author
Bernard Gilbert
1882–1927
A vivid voice of rural Lincolnshire, he wrote poems, novels, plays, and essays that captured village life, local speech, and the social tensions of early 20th-century England. Though largely forgotten today, his work has been praised by later scholars as a rich record of countryside life and change.
1 Audiobook
Rebel Verses
by Bernard Gilbert
About the author
Born in Billinghay, Lincolnshire, in 1882, Bernard Samuel Gilbert became a remarkably varied writer whose work ranged across poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and political commentary. Modern accounts of his life consistently place him as a Lincolnshire writer with a deep feel for the county’s people, landscape, and dialect, and they note that he died in 1927.
Gilbert is especially remembered for writing about rural England at a time of upheaval. His dialect poems and other writings drew on village speech and everyday experience, while later academic and local-history projects have described his work as an important record of early 20th-century countryside life. He also wrote prolifically enough to leave behind a broad body of work rather than a single famous title.
His reputation faded after his death, but interest in him has revived through research and public-history projects in Lincolnshire. That renewed attention presents him as a distinctive literary witness to the world of working people, farming communities, and changing English country life.