Long Live Great Bardfield, & Love to You All
The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood
edited by Anne Ullman

Planned for seven or eight years, this was a monumental production based on the Autobiography which Tirzah Garwood, the wife of Eric Ravilious, wrote when she was coming toward the premature end of her life. Tirzah has a facility in her writing for perceptive observation of the world around her, and I would happily rate her story alongside Gwen Raverat's Period Piece, while being substantially longer and more detailed. The section on life in Great Bardfield during the 1930s, among the unique artistic community is a fascinating first-hand, slightly detached account of a precious and outstanding group of artists.

The text has been transcribed from a number of Tirzah’s handwritten notebooks, and edited by her daughter Anne Ullmann; she has in addition written a separate critical study of Tirzah's work, which will be published after this volume (in a further separate volume, since the Autobiography is very substantial, and demands wide-ranging illustrations of work other than Tirzah's own).

Writing in The Times, which printed a full page review on April 21st 2012, John Russell Taylor wrote 'Long Live Great Bardfield is the latest in a distinguished line of books from Simon Lawrence's Fleece Press. The design and workmanship are, as ever, exquisite, and the text is of absorbing interest. . . . This belated encounter is a delight from every point of view.'

I often feel that books I publish have been a privilege to bring into the world, Long Live Great Bardfield being no exception.

304 pages, bound in quarter patterned paper (designed by Tirzah) with a cloth spine and paper label, there were 550 copies, published in 2012.

Long Live Great Bardfield was republished in 2016 by Persephone Books in a slightly abridged, small format edition with a few black and white engravings.

This book is no longer available from the Fleece Press