In many works of literature, the grandmother is a ministering angel, a healer and a counsellor to her grandchildren and neighbours. In Maxim Gorky’s Childhood (1913), for instance, she compensates for her husband’s cruelty to the young hero. But the grandmother of Božena Němcová’s book is different. She is an emphatic and deliberate incarnation of the goodness and wisdom of the mid-19th-century Czech peasantry, as the author saw it. These ‘scenes from village life’ form not so much a novel as a series of episodes in the last few years of the wise old lady as she prepares to die.

Almost every literate Czech has read The Grandmother (1855). Despite its moments of darkness – sudden death by lightning, the miseries of Austrian conscription, executions, floods, storms and memories of famine – its folkloric appeal to children and adults alike remains as strong as ever, even if on first acquaintance the tone seems so idyllic and pious as to be saccharine.

Němcová (1820–62) was a writer who would surely have left her mark on the whole world had she written in a major European language and lived longer. But she died of cancer in her early forties, and aside from The Grandmother she left only a few stories behind – stories