Dacia Maraini: A Voice for Silenced Women
I first came across the work of Dacia Maraini during the year of #WaferThinBooks, when I read Isolina, her reconstruction of the murder of a poor pregnant young woman in Verona. I was drawn to …
Neglected Authors
Writers whose lives and works have been ignored, overlooked, or completely forgotten by the mainstream of criticism and reference works.
Why Gale Wilhelm Stopped
In August, we’ll be publishing a new edition of Gale Wilhelm’s 1935 novel, We Too Are Drifting, in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press. Despite the fact that We Too Are Drifting is …
Joan O’Donovan and Her Misfit Spinsters
“Your time’s your own, and don’t you forget it, my girl: for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can do what you bloody well choose,” Eva Wotton reminds herself at the start …
Verity Bargate and the Revenge for Lies
Verity Bargate wrote three short, savage novels — No Mama No (1978), Children Crossing (1979), and Tit for Tat (1981) — before dying too, too young at the age of 41 just as reviews for …
Betty Swanwick, Artist and Subversive Novelist
If Betty Swanwick is remembered today, it’s usually for her painting The Dream, which was used on the cover of the Genesis album Selling England by the Pound. And it’s as a painter she would …
Margaret Fishback, Poetess: A 1932 Sketch by Joseph Mitchell (plus notes)
Margaret Fishback was among the most commercially successful poets of the 1930s, a prolific writer of comic verse who probably sold more books and had more poems published in more magazines than the better-known Ogden …
Margaret Boylen and her Odd Outcasts
Margaret Boylen was a writer ahead of her time. Her three novels were published in the age of Eisenhower and Father Knows Best, when men like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs could get away with …
John Lodwick, a Forgotten Novelist: Covers and Reviews
A look this week at the many novels of John Lodwick, a prolific writer who died at 43 from injuries after an auto accident in 1959. Anthony Burgess once said he started writing with the …
The Forgotten Short Fiction of Edward Thomas
This is a guest post by Irfan Shah It started, of course, with his poetry, predictably, with his best-known work, “Adlestrop”, and inevitably, with the famous, final lines that spell-bind like few others: And for …
Cressida Lindsay, Bohemian
A year or so ago, I picked up this cute Ballantine paperback copy of No Wonderland from 1967, one of a half-dozen or so contemporary British novels published to exploit America’s fascination with the Beatles, …
Edith de Born and the Sense of Foreignness
“Have you heard of the lady who writes under the name Edith de Born — an Austrian-Hungarian-Jewess I suspect – married to a French banker called Bisch?” Evelyn Waugh asked his friend Nancy Mitford in …
Victoria Kelrich Morhaim, Conflicted Feminist
When it comes to books, good things often come in misleading packages. This is particularly true when it comes to pulp paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these were sold at newsstands and …
Raymond Souster, The Bard of Toronto
Raymond Souster was born in Toronto and, aside from four years he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War Two, lived there for over ninety years. And almost every day of his …
Louise W. King – The Would-Be Wodehouse of Queer Greenwich Village
I first learned of Louise W. King’s queer comedies from Barbara Grier’s capsule book reviews (written as Gene Damon) in the 1960s lesbian magazine The Ladder. “If ever a novel could rightly be termed Gay, …
Robert Harling
This is a guest post by Stephen Bloomfield Robert Harling? Steel Magnolias and The First Wives Club? American playwright, actor and film producer? No – not that one. This one: Robert Harling, British author of …
Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield …
The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison: Solved
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled “The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison” that surveyed four of the six novels published between 1963 and 1972 by a writer of that name. Aside from …
The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison
Back in August 2021, when I interviewed Michael Walmer about his independent press MichaelWalmer.com, which has reissued dozens of fine neglected books, he asked if I knew anything about the 1960s British author Jessamy Morrison: …
Stanton Forbes
I’m not a great reader of mystery novels. I have nothing against the genre, but even its most loyal fans will have to admit that it has a healthy share of workmanlike prose, two-dimensional characters, …
A conversation about G. E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia with the Lost Ladies of Lit
Kim Askew and Amy Helmes of the wonderful Lost Ladies of Lit podcast recently invited me to talk with them about G. E. Trevelyan’s remarkable first novel Appius and Virginia. Back in print now thanks …