Lorca wrote, ‘I love the countryside. I feel myself linked to it in all my emotions. Shepherds, fields, sky, solitude. Total simplicity: my oldest childhood memories have the flavour of the earth.’ Certainly his plots, rooted in the stifling atmosphere of Spanish village life, are played out against this vast, realistic, natural backdrop. The idea for Blood Wedding, a simple story of family honour and revenge, came from a newspaper cutting. Yerma depicts the tragedy of a childless woman in a country where fertility is vital. In Bernarda Alba, a dominating mother clamps the lid on a houseful of smouldering and resentful spinster daughters, until the inevitable rebellion precipitates the inevitable tragedy. But through a rare and compelling combination of the poetic and popular, Lorca transcends the language of local gossip, and makes us conscious of a relentless, fateful undercurrent which, while allowing the protagonists to improvise on the theme, never permits them to change the tune. Their tragic destiny is never in doubt. Hunted down in the depths of the forest, Leonardo cries out against the overwhelming inevitability of his fate: ‘The fault is not mine. The fault is in the earth.’

Published by the Folio Society in 1977, Three Tragedies (Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba) by Federico García Lorca, translated by Sue Bradbury, 184 pages, frontispiece and sixteen vignette linocuts by Peter Pendrey

Bound in red cloth with pale blue paper on the front board printed in brown with a linocut by Pendrey, pink endleaves, black slipcase

The gilding on the book's spine is a little rubbed (see photos), otherwise book and slipcase are both in very good condition

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