Mary Chamberlain

First published in 1975, Fenwomen is a vivid social and oral history of an isolated village in the Cambridgeshire fens, utilising the previously unheard voices of the women who lived there.

In an extended new introduction to this Full Circle edition, Mary Chamberlain recalls her original intent to write a “feminist Akenfield”, a “history from the bottom up … not of great country houses and the chatelaines who ran them but of women as labourers and labourers’ wives”. She describes, too, how she revisited the village and talked to some of the original women about how their lives had changed over 35 years.