Coppard was born the son of a tailor and a housemaid in
Folkestone and had little formal education. He grew up in difficult, poverty-stricken circumstances; he later described his childhood as "shockingly poor" and
Frank O'Connor described Coppard's early life as 'cruel'. He quit school at the age of nine when his father died and was "taken off to London" to live with his uncle's family in "a street between Old Ford and Victoria Park". He first worked as an errand boy for a tailor, then as a Reuter's messenger. Returning to live with his mother in Brighton, he continued to work in menial jobs, as office boy and junior clerk for small businesses and manufacturing firms – but by the age of 15 he was also earning side money as a professional sprinter, and using that money to buy books. Having married Lily Ann Richardson in 1905, he left Brighton two years later for Oxford and further clerking jobs. In Oxford his various places of work included the
Eagle Ironworks (a job that exempted him from military service). As an ‘irascible autodidact with nascent literary ambitions’, Coppard mixed with undergraduates and attended public lectures; in Oxford he also joined the
Independent Labour Party and got to know budding literary figures including
Aldous Huxley and
Louis Golding. He was part of a literary group, the
New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read
Elizabethan drama.
W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings. During this period he met
Richard Hughes and
Edgell Rickword, among others. The first of his stories to be published was ‘Communion’ in
The Varsity in 1916; by the end of 1918 he had published six more stories in magazines and the
Manchester Guardian. After the war, Coppard separated from his wife and went to live in ‘Shepherd's Pit’, a cottage outside Headington where he set about becoming a full-time writer. Around this time he befriended
Robert Graves, who was living nearby in Islip. His first collection,
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, was published by the
Golden Cockerel Press in 1921 and was a critical success; it was the first of over a dozen short-story collections he published in the 1920s and 1930s. He also published several volumes of poetry, beginning with
Hips and Haws in 1922. , and two children In 1932 after Lily Anne had died of cancer, Coppard married
Winifred de Kok, with whom he had already had one daughter. Among Coppard's other love affairs was a relationship with
Gay Taylor, wife of Harold Taylor, who founded the Golden Cockerel Press. Coppard's fiction was influenced by
Thomas Hardy and
de Maupassant among others. His work enjoyed some popularity in the United States after his
Collected Tales was chosen as a selection by the
Book of the Month Club. Coppard also listed
Sterne,
Dickens,
James,
Hardy,
Shaw,
Chekhov and
Joyce as authors he valued; Coppard's nephew was
George Coppard, a British soldier who served with the UK
Machine Gun Corps during
World War I, known for his memoirs
With A Machine Gun to Cambrai.
Critical reception Coppard's short stories were praised by
Ford Madox Ford and
Frank O'Connor. Coppard's supernatural fiction was admired by
Algernon Blackwood. Brian Stableford argues that Coppard's fantasy has a similar style to that of
Walter de la Mare and that "many of his mercurial and oddly plaintive fantasies are deeply disturbing". Since his death, several selections of Coppard's stories have been published:
these include Dusky Ruth and Other Stories, with an introduction by Doris Lessing, and
The Hurly Burly and Other Stories, edited by Russell Banks. In his introduction, Banks praises Coppard's treatment of women: "Like Maupassant, [he] was a careful, affectionate, compassionate observer of the lives of women, particularly poor, abandoned, or 'fallen' women." Reviewing Banks's selection in the
London Review of Books,
Blake Morrison noted that Coppard's tales "are chiefly concerned with ... romantic intrigue, disappointment and despair" but that his best work had rural settings: "[Coppard's] rare forays into an urban middle-class setting are unconvincing; unless his characters are speaking in rural dialect, with a keen attentiveness to the natural world, they sound off key." The 1972 ITV series
Country Matters adapted five more Coppard stories - ‘The Higgler’, ‘The Black Dog’, The Watercress Girl’, ‘The Sullens Sisters’ and ‘Craven Arms’ - and was shown as part of the
Masterpiece Theatre series in the USA. ==Works==