The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
First edition cover
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| Author | Gerald Basil Edwards |
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| Cover artist | Paul Leith |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Hamish Hamilton |
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Publication date
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16 March 1981 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 488 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC | 7680723 |
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a novel by Gerald Basil Edwards first published in United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton in 1981, and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in the same year. It has since been published by Penguin books and New York Review Books in their classics series, as well as in French and Italian.
It is the fictionalised autobiography of an archetypal Guernseyman, Ebenezer Le Page, who lives through the dramatic changes in the island of the Guernsey, Channel Islands from the late nineteenth century, through to the 1960s.
Ebenezer was born in the late nineteenth century, and dies in the early 1960s. He lived his whole life in the Vale. He never married, despite a few flings with local girls, and a tempestuous relationship with Liza Queripel of Pleinmont. He only left the island once, to travel to Jersey to watch the Muratti. For most of his life he was a grower and fisherman, although he also served in the North regiment of the Royal Guernsey Militia (though not outside the island) and did some jobbing work for the States of Guernsey in the latter part of his life. Guernsey is a microcosm of the world as Dublin is to James Joyce and Dorset is to Hardy. After a life fraught with difficulties and full of moving episodes, Ebenezer is ready to die happy, bequeathing his pot of gold and autobiography (The Book of Ebenezer Le Page) to the young artist he befriends, after an incident in which the latter smashed his greenhouse.
Art student Edward Chaney met Edwards in his old age, when he was living a reclusive life near Weymouth in Dorset. Edwards had had a fraught and difficult life. He left Guernsey to study at Bristol University. He then moved to London where he encountered group of writers, which included his friends John Middleton Murry, J. S. Collis and Stephen Potter. There was an anticipation that he would become the next D. H. Lawrence, and he was in fact commissioned by Jonathan Cape to write Lawrence's biography, before his death.
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