Voice that described rural life's harsh reality

Winifred Foley, aged 18.

Winifred Foley, who has died aged 94, was a late bloomer. Her best-selling memoir A Child in the Forest, which recounted a remarkably impoverished and detached existence in the remote Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England, was not published until she was 60. Two other volumes later appeared and the Forest Trilogy sold well into a market nostalgic for the imagined simplicities that the English countryside came to represent in the 1970s.

Winifred Mary Mason was born in 1914 at the pit village of Brierley, near Cinderford, into a household with no gas, running water or electricity, and little to eat. "We learnt to chew slowly to make food last," she wrote. But the coal miner father of Young Poll, as she was known in the family, was an inspiration: he debated politics and philosophy and inculcated in his daughter a love of books, and a leaning towards his own socialist views.

At 14, Foley entered domestic service, working as a maid in London before taking several subsequent jobs, including that of waitress, or "nippy", at a Lyons Corner House, in Oxford Street. She was slow to realise that many of the male customers were more enamoured of the waitresses themselves than of the food the girls served. Her married life, as her childhood, was spent in rural isolation with the radio for company once her four children by her woodman husband Syd were grown.

It was through the Radio 4 programme Woman's Hour that she found her voice, when the social historian John Burnett appealed for unpublished autobiographical material during a broadcast. Foley sent in her handwritten notebooks, and on publication critics praised her direct, unaffected prose. The income from the book's publication allowed Foley, at long last, to escape from grinding poverty, but she continued to write into her old age for the mere pleasure of it, penning a number of romantic sagas. Printed in large type, with titles such as Two Men and a Maiden and Village Fates, they appealed to an older, female audience and did not match her earlier success.

Unfortunately, she did not live to see the publication of the last volume of her memoirs, Full Hearts and Empty Bellies, which appeared on April 2. Winifred Foley was born on July 25 1914 and died on March 21. She is survived by three sons and one daughter. * The National