'Full of dignity, courage and humour, and as fresh and insightful as the day it was written, FENWOMEN is a vital portrait of rural women's lives - not only as they were lived in the 1970s in one Cambridgeshire village, but in the generations before it, all over the country, and reaching forward into today's world, too' MELISSA HARRISON

Mary Chamberlain's vivid social and oral history of an isolated village in the Cambridgeshire Fens was the first book ever published by Virago. Told through the voices and lives of women, whose memories span over one hundred years, it provides a unique portrait of a working-class, rural community where intermarriage was common, most inhabitants lived all their lives in the village, and until the middle of the twentieth century a single family owned almost all the land.

50th anniversary edition - now a Virago Modern Classic with a new introduction by Alexandra Harris