Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. "I was a poet but I longed to be a painter like the rest of them," Blythe told The Guardian. "What I basically am is a listener and a watcher. I absorb, without asking questions, but I don't forget things, and I was inspired by a lot of these people because they worked so hard and didn't make a fuss. They just lived their lives in a very independent and disciplined way." Writing In 1960 Blythe published his first book, A Treasonable Growth, a novel set in the Suffolk countryside. The Age of Illusion, a collection of essays exploring the social history of life in England between the wars, appeared in 1963. That book led to his being asked to edit a series of classics for the Penguin English Library, beginning with Jane Austen's Emma and continuing with work by William Hazlitt, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. There were short stories and book reviews, and Blythe later prepared a number of anthologies, including The Pleasure of Diaries (1989) and Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War (1991). In 1969 he published Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, a fictionalised account of life in a Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966. Blythe had spent the winter of 1966–7 listening to three generations of his neighbours in the Suffolk villages of Charsfield and Debach, recording their views on education, class, welfare, religion, farming and death. 'Akenfield' is a made-up placename based partly upon Akenham (a small village just north of Ipswich) and probably partly on Charsfield. "When I wrote Akenfield," Blythe said, "I had no idea that anything particular was happening, but it was the last days of the old traditional rural life in Britain. And it vanished." The book is regarded as a classic of its type and was made into a film, Akenfield, by Peter Hall in 1974. When the film was aired it attracted fifteen million viewers; Blythe made an appearance as the vicar. "I actually haven't worked on this land but I've seen the land ploughed by horses," Blythe told The Guardian in 2011. "So I have a feeling and understanding in that respect – of its glory and bitterness." In the 1970s Blythe nursed John Nash in ill health, leading him to publish his reflections on old age in 1979 in The View in Winter. In 1977 Blythe inherited Bottengoms