Books: Shropshire Romance

THE HAPPY PRISONER (312 pp.) —Monica Dickens—Lippincott ($2.75).

Readers who like their fiction served with tea and crumpets in an atmosphere of tea cozies and grate fires will probably like this novel. In writing it, Author Dickens (great-granddaughter of Charles) pays her respects to the time-honored story of the patient—this one a wounded soldier—who falls in love with his nurse. But she has also created an affectionate picture of a Shropshire household. The Happy Prisoner exudes a country-fresh odor of plowed earth and drying horse blankets.

Hinkley Manor, which "had never been restored or preserved or quainted up with spinning-wheels and wrought-iron lanterns,"...

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