In Search of James Prior

James Prior died in 1922. In his centenary year, Ailish D'Arcy goes in search of Nottinghamshire's lost author. Best known for his novel Forest Folk, a tale of conflict and romance set in the Nottinghamshire countryside at the time of the Luddite uprising during the Napoleonic Wars, James Prior has often been depicted as a recluse. But what was he really like? In this study James Prior emerges as a poet and novelist with a body of work that has been neglected for too long, and who made a contribution to the study of Notts dialect that is unsurpassed.