Juliet Nicolson

Who would be a farmer’s wife?

‘Some days I feel like I’m drowning,’ admits Helen Rebanks, caught between cooking, housework, admin, tagging lambs and the school run at the Lake District family farm

Helen Rebanks. [Imogen Whiteley]

On the opening page of The Farmer’s Wife, Helen Rebanks quotes George Eliot’s famous passage from Middlemarch. Dorothea adds to ‘the growing good of the world’ through her ‘unhistoric acts’ and by having ‘lived faithfully a hidden life’. With this enchanting, funny, fearless book, Rebanks brings her own ‘unhistoric’ life unequivocally out of hiding.

The blood, mud, slog, exhaustion, bureaucracy and financial angst of farming are ever-present

She lives with her husband James (a bestselling writer) and their four children in the Lake District on their farm shared with six sheepdogs, two ponies, 20 chickens, 500 sheep and 50 cattle.

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