ENCHANTED GROUND

Woodhouse's previous period novels, set in the early 1800's, (The Native Air, 1991, etc.) featured admirable, strong-minded-and- limbed females coping with moldering estates and feckless men, a smattering of entertaining eccentrics, and a tangle of involvements. Here—in the 1920's—the women, living and dead (the past is a constant presence), are the first-rate copers, the country estate in splendid decay, and the story simple, weighted by country time and character as a woman at midlife learns some secrets, surmounts a crisis. Queenly, tough Harriet died in 1892, and then daughter-in-law Deborah died in childbirth. Now, Patricia (``Paddy''), in her 40s, has been forced to rent Bretton Hall, which Harriet had struggled to save and which Paddy's brother Tom, in Italy, would be happy to sell. The tenants are an ill-matched pair: flighty, restless Laura; kind, subdued Hugh; and their child Etta, an ungainly eight-year- old, who begins to blossom and tag along with gruff, strong, wildly unfashionable Paddy. Meanwhile, throughout the days of the hard- working country rounds, as Laura flits to Paris and Hugh begins to discover some new affections, there are many contacts with John, the current Chance—the Chances being tenant farmers become prosperous but declared by the Bretton men always out of bounds. Why? And what did three generations of Chance men mean to Bretton women? The secret to which Etta—literally—holds the key is revealed...but can Bretton Hall be saved? Settled in the lovely countryside with its ``sense of extraordinary permanence in the ancient trees''—and with the story matching the slow steady pace of seasonal change—this is the author's best to date (Woodhouse seems more at home in a more recent time period). A prime re-creation for country-minded Anglophiles.