The term Midlands is not very descriptive when applied to those counties in central England whose towns and cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were outgrowths of the Industrial Revolution. Yet this same territory also makes up some of the most scenic beauty in the country. The Midlands is the area in which the Middle English dialect developed and hence, also, our modern English. Rushden in Northamptonshire is in the heart of the Midlands, and Herbert Bates was born there on 16 May 1905.

He became, before his death on 31 January 1974, one of the more notable of English short-fiction writers in an age when this form of literature flourished, and the quality of the short fiction he produced during forty-four years of writing was sustained. Bates is also well known for his large output of novels, and he successfully wrote descriptive nature books about his native land. But there...