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James Dering and his new wife Rhoda return from their honeymoon to begin married life at Boscath, an isolated sheep farm in the Scottish Borders. James is delighted to be back among fields, animals and agricultural responsibilities; Rhoda, a talented painter accustomed to London, must decide whether romantic rural seclusion remains quite so romantic once it starts raining horizontally and the nearest lively gathering involves discussions about sheep. Winter and Rough Weather is the third of D. E. Stevenson?s novels connected with Vittoria Cottage and Music in the Hills, although it can be read perfectly well on its own. Familiar characters reappear, new relationships develop and the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside continue the important work of knowing one another?s affairs while maintaining that they would never dream of interfering. Rhoda has chosen marriage over her established artistic life, but her talent has not politely disappeared merely because she now lives on a farm. At first, Boscath?s remoteness threatens to leave her lonely and unfulfilled. Gradually, however, the landscape gives her fresh inspiration, and her interest in the bright but difficult young Duggie provides both of them with an unexpected sense of purpose. Painting, which seemed likely to become a casualty of domestic life, instead begins revealing things that other people might have preferred to leave safely concealed. Around them, rural society proceeds in its deceptively quiet fashion. The local gentry are adjusting to reduced circumstances, post-war shortages and the alarming discovery that family importance does not automatically supply servants, money or a dinner for one hundred guests. A wealthy newcomer has acquired a nearby estate, old loyalties remain attached to places their owners can no longer afford, romances move forward and backward, and various secrets await the precise combination of accident, observation and village curiosity required to expose them. Then comes the winter. Snow descends upon the hills with the beautiful ruthlessness of something that looks excellent from indoors. Roads vanish, farms become islands and ordinary inconveniences acquire the possibility of genuine disaster. Stevenson is particularly good at contrasting the splendour of the frozen landscape with the practical reality of attempting to live in it. Snow may inspire painters and poets, but sheep farmers are obliged to go outside. Despite its title, Winter and Rough Weather is not a grim endurance story in which everyone slowly disappears beneath a snowdrift. It is warm, observant domestic fiction filled with relationships, misunderstandings, difficult children, missing people, changing social arrangements and the small acts of kindness by which communities keep themselves functioning. The rough weather is meteorological, emotional and occasionally matrimonial, but Stevenson maintains her characteristic faith that sensible people, given sufficient tea and conversation, can generally make progress. The novel was originally published in 1951 under this title and has also appeared as Shoulder the Sky, which sounds considerably more heroic but gives less warning about the rain. This 1972 Fontana edition belongs to the period when paperback covers were expected to attract readers without the modern assistance of metallic lettering, celebrity endorsements or a mysterious woman photographed from behind. The book is in Good condition, showing the ordinary signs of age and previous ownership but remaining sound, complete and ready to read. It is an appealing older paperback rather than a pristine ornamental object, and therefore suitable for being carried about, left beside a chair or read while actual rough weather conducts itself theatrically against the window. Ideal for admirers of D. E. Stevenson, Scottish settings, post-war domestic fiction and novels in which nothing supernatural occurs, yet everybody?s life can still be transformed by a painting, a se.
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