"Well, I see it like this," returned Priscilla with great animation. "He needs help in saving his harvest. Well, the answer is-make a jolly Harvest Camp. Let's all get together, go down and camp in the park or the stables or any old place. I'll do the arranging. A mixed party, of course-'Come lasses and lads,' style-'Olde Englysshe' atmosphere-ye olde hay-wain-sun-bonnets?"

Who could foresee the aftershocks of cheerful young Lucinda ("Cinders") Bradsole's jaunt to London to visit her sister Angela? Her parents, Sir Giles and Lady Bradsole, are struggling to keep their farm afloat amid austere postwar conditions, and are now facing a desperate labour shortage (what with no more soldiers or prisoners of war about to lend a hand). But Angela's roommate Priscilla, who fancies herself a psychoanalyst, sees their crisis as an opportunity for festive rustic frolics and intensive observation of human nature. She invites her current "project", a modern poet named Aylwin Vines ("quite incomprehensible but frightfully clever") and their handsome Canadian neighbour Simon Kingsford, who has secret reasons of his own for a rural sojourn. And before he knows it, Sir Giles has far more help (and in quite different form) than he could ever have bargained for.

Harvest Home, first published in 1950, is a rollicking romantic comedy in Dorothy Lambert's inimitable style.

Originally published in 1950, this new edition features a new introduction by twentieth-century women's historian Elizabeth Crawford.

"Bubbling with fun" Punch

Dorothy Lambert was born Alicia Dorothea Irwin on 17 February 1884 in County Cork, Ireland. Until her marriage she lived with her family in 'Roskeen', a Georgian country house near Mallow.In 1906 she married Eric Lambert, a solicitor. Soon after their marriage the couple sailed to Bombay, where their daughter, Eileen (known by her middle name 'Audrey') was born in 1908. Dorothy returned to Cork for the birth in July 1913 of their son, Thomas, who only lived for a few months. The Lamberts were both back in India at the outbreak of the First World War, during which Eric served in the army, but after the war they returned to England, where Eric became a partner in a firm of Dover solicitors, and was later Dover's coroner. The Lamberts lived in Shepherdswell, a few miles outside Dover, where Dorothy and her family immersed themselves in the social and cultural life of the village. This included numerous theatrical entertainments, some of the plays written by Dorothy herself.Her novel-writing career began at the age of 43, and ultimately included twenty-seven novels, the last published in 1953. Dorothy Lambert died in a nursing home near Dover in 1967, having outlived Eric by nine years.