Diogenes' Sandals by Mrs Arthur Kennard (1893)

This one definitely sits in the afterwash of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. Kennard uses instead an old Great Western railway carriage marooned on a woodland property north east of Salisbury in Wiltshire. In it she places two love-lorn young men, who have decided they need to 'rough it' in order to rid themselves not only of their torn hearts, but also the grime of city life. Like Jerome, she's interested in the trials and mishaps of such an experiment, and in a small amount of witty comment on society. I can't remember Three Men in a Boat terribly well, but the difference between the two, I think, is Kennard's love of nature and the countryside. There are some lovely descriptions here of wildlife, the locale, and nature's glory. (Perhaps Jerome did the same, and I've forgotten.) This is set near Winterbourne Gunner, called Summerslow Gunner for these fictional purposes. There is a photograph of just such a railway carriage as a frontispiece. So, the question arises: how much of this is reportage, rather than fiction? I can't imagine Nina Kennard, an 1890s woman, enjoying, or being allowed to enjoy at least, the raw life depicted here. There's so little biographical information about her that one is left to wonder. Was she atypical, and a partaker in more wildness than her fellow women? Was this book prepared on secondhand terms from talk with someone who did these things? I know she had a 'sporting' writer sister-in-law. It would be interesting to find out. Ultimately this lacks a species of unity of purpose and simplicity of incident that Jerome's book has, but equally this one does not deserve its utter oblivion - there is entertainment, wit, colour and comment here which makes for pleasure.