Ronald George Blythe CBE FRSL (6 November 1922 – 14 January 2023) was a British writer, essayist and editor, best known for his work Akenfield (1969), an account of agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s.
[5] His London-born mother, Matilda (née Elkins), had worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the war and passed on to her son her passion for books.
She introduced Blythe to her husband, the artist John Nash, inviting him to their house, Bottengoms Farm, near Wormingford on the border of Essex and Suffolk, which he first visited in 1947.
[6][7] He met E. M. Forster,[9][10] was briefly involved with Patricia Highsmith,[5][9][10] spent time with the Nashes, and was part of the Bohemian world associated with the artists of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End near Hadleigh, run by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines.
That book led to his being asked to edit a series of classics for the Penguin English Library, beginning with Jane Austen's Emma and continuing with work by William Hazlitt, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.
Blythe had spent the winter of 1966–7 listening to three generations of his neighbours in the Suffolk villages of Charsfield and Debach, recording their views on education, class, welfare, religion, farming and death.
[7][18] He later published a book, First Friends (1999), based on, and quoting from, a trunk of letters he found in the house that recorded the friendship between the Nash brothers, John's future wife, Christine Külenthal, and the artist Dora Carrington.
He continued to live and work at Bottengoms Farm in Wormingford until his death, following the opinion expressed in The View in Winter that the elderly should remain in their own homes whenever possible.
[27] Blythe bequeathed his farmhouse, Bottengoms, to the Essex Wildlife Trust, which intends to use it as a conservation site, as well as a centre for education and art.
[13] In 2006 Blythe was awarded a Benson Medal for lifelong achievement by the Royal Society of Literature,[31] and in 2015 he received an honorary degree from the University of Suffolk.