Born Dora Jessie Shafe. She wrote novels about the gentle rhythms of English village life, written under the crisp, pedagogical pseudonym Miss Read, drew a wide following on both sides of the Atlantic, died on April 7 at her home in Shefford Woodlands, in Berkshire, England. She was 98. in more than 30 books published from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, Mrs. Saint chronicled the goings-on in two fictional villages, Fairacre and Thrush Green. The Fairacre series, comprising about 20 titles, began in 1955 with "Village School." Written in the first person, the series was originally marketed as the memoirs of a "Miss Read," a rural schoolteacher, as Mrs. Saint had been in life. In her second series, which she undertook to give herself a reprieve from the rigors of first-person narrative, opened with "Thrush Green," published in 1959. Miss Read is the nominal author of these books, too, though she does not appear as a character. Several titles in each series remain in print in paperback. Both series, which have been likened to the work of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Barbara Pym, center on the ebb and flow of rural life: schooldays and festivals; tea parties and flower shows; thatched cottages, herbaceous borders and evocative descriptions of creatures human and non-. (In the second Fairacre book, "Village Diary," from 1957, Mrs. Saint writes of "a wood-pigeon, as soft and opal as a London twilight.") The novels are peopled by characters emblematic of English pastoral life: nosy Mrs. Pringle, the school cleaner; Mrs. Curdle, who runs a traveling fair; and, of course, the vicar. With their evocations of peaceable communities that seemed to defy the press of modernity, the books were balm to postwar readers. Reviewing "Village School" in The New York Times Book Review in 1956, Mary Ellen Chase, a novelist and Hardy scholar, wrote: "It is difficult to convey the charm and grace of this book. Seemingly slight in subject matter and disarmingly simple in its manner of writing, it yet lingers in one's mind as something true, rare and lovely." When she was a child, her family moved to the Kentish countryside, and it was there that she had her first taste of village life. She dreamed of being a journalist. Her father said it was no fit job for a woman, so she trained as a teacher at Homerton College, now part of Cambridge University. She married a fellow teacher, Douglas Saint, in 1940; they were married until his death in 2004. She taught school in West London and later in various Berkshire villages. She also contributed sketches about rural life to Punch, The Times Educational Supplement and other publications. One sketch, an autobiographical account of teaching at a country school, caught the eye of a British publishing house. Because the publisher, Michael Joseph, was known for memoirs, Mrs. Saint was asked to cast "Village School" as an autobiography and devise a name for its middle-aged schoolmistress-author. She chose Read, her mother's spectacularly apt maiden name.
Her other books include two actual memoirs, "A Fortunate Grandchild" (1982) and "Time Remembered" (1986); children's titles; and a recipe book, "Miss Read's Country Cooking" (1969). She was named a member of the Order of the British Empire in 1998.