As a semi-regular feature, I will be selecting books which I think can qualify as 'lost classics'. Each book I pick will have been found as the result of foraging in second hand bookshops, must be relatively unknown, and a good read. I love buying books second hand - you can nearly always find something unexpected, and hopefully end up reading something you wouldn't otherwise have come across. My first 'lost classic' is
Gone to Earth, by Mary Webb. Set in the Welsh borderlands, this is the story of a wild teenage girl named Hazel with an intense love for nature and her own freedom, who becomes caught between the attentions of two men, with tragic consequences. As John Buchan explains in the introduction, Hazel 'suffers because she is involved in the clash of common lusts and petty jealousies...she is a creature of the wilds, with no heritage in the orderly populous world'.
