To mark the end of her residency at Hardy’s Cottage in October, literary website Writing Places asked writer-in-residence Virginia Astley to consider contemporary rural life in her essay.

“It’s another damp autumn morning and dragging Henry Hoover round Hardy’s study I notice how, in their seasonal way, extended families of spiders are starting to colonise various corners and cornicing. I’m really not sure about vacuuming up entire families of spiders, or those daddy long legs scurrying behind the desk – on the one hand I may not doing my job properly if they stay but on the other, I don’t want to be part of insectageddon. Thinking of Hardy’s poem August Midnight I decide to head downstairs for a dustpan and brush.”

Read the full essay over on the Writing Places site: http://writingplaces.literatureworks.org.uk/autumn-days-in-hardy-country-a-creative-response-to-contemporary-rural-life-an-essay-by-virginia-astley//

http://writingplaces.literatureworks.org.uk
www.nationaltrust.org.uk