BGU historian rediscovers long-lost Lincolnshire author

Bishop Grosseteste University's (BGU) Professor Andrew Jackson (Executive Dean: Research & Knowledge Exchange) has just published a book on Bernard Samuel Gilbert, who was an outstanding author whose name is all but forgotten today. The book arises from a rediscovery of Gilbert’s work and the volume is an important new study that seeks to re-establish the writer’s reputation.

Gilbert was born in Billinghay in Lincolnshire in 1882 and was returned there for burial following his death in 1927. He wrote prolifically from around the age of thirty up to his death at forty-five. Gilbert’s literature spans poetry, novels, plays, tracts on agriculture, political pamphlets, and newspaper columns. He wrote of contemporary Lincolnshire and rural England, life and work on the land, and country customs and beliefs.

Gilbert's First World War Home Front poetry in dialect and his fenland fiction and verse are extraordinary. Furthermore, his emerging multi-volume scheme – his ‘Old England’, a ‘Gilbert Country’ even – is quite remarkable.

The book has been published by the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, History of Lincolnshire Committee, and is available through the SLHA Bookshop, Jews Court, 2/3 Steep Hill, Lincoln. For further information, please contact booksales@slha.org.uk, or go to www.slha.org.uk.

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