Seven Days Whipping, by John Biggs, Jr. (1928)
This is a note about a footnote. If John Biggs, Jr. is mentioned today, it’s inevitably as a supporting player in the life of his much more famous Princeton roommate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and if …
Justly Neglected?
“Most neglected writers have been neglected for perfectly understandable reasons – usually because they are obscure, difficult or just plain boring.” Kate Saunders, The New Statesman, August 28, 1998
The Woman’s Harvest, by Anna Floyd (1916)
This was the most surprising book I’ve read in a long time. I was initially interested in The Woman’s Harvest because, having been published in 1916, it appeared to be the first English novel to …
Tracks of Forgotten Books, or, Subjects For No Further Research
I love publishers who made a practice of listing their other releases on the flyleaf or dust jacket, because these can be the clues that lead me to a forgotten gem. But sometimes, these lists …
“The Worst Book Ever Published”
Poor Peter Vansittart. When he died after a career spanning seven decades and producing over 40 books, some newspapers reached back to the very beginning and dredged up a damning line written about his first …
City Without a Heart, by Anonymous (1933)
Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a …
What to Make of Rod McKuen?
I wonder how many people under the age of 40 understand the point of this question. If you’re under 40, by the time you learned to read, Rod McKuen had already begun to fade from …
By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee (1960)
Few things give you as good a picture of life at a particular time and place as seeing what people considered satire. Satire with legs is tough to write. Barbs that seemed razor sharp at …
Cats in the Isle of Man, by Daisy Fellowes (1929)
CAUTION! Any person or persons who attempt to recognize their own sordid idiosyncracies in any character in this book are warned that anything they say will be used in evidence against them. This disclaimer may …
Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock, by Neil Bell (1958)
Let me admit at the start that I bought this book because of its cover. Let me also admit that I only finished it because of what I paid for it. In a recent class, …
Life Comes to Seathorpe, by Neil Bell (1946)
I’m not sure how I managed to consider myself an expert in neglected books and remain ignorant of Neil Bell and his massive oeuvre until recently, but it was only the sight of the striking …
All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s, by Hugh Edwards (1933)
Except. Remember that Lucy is described as Stanyhurst’s sixteen year-old mistress. We learn that he first met Lucy at the age of fourteen, when she was the mistress of his uncle, Lord Cluny, and that …
A Letter from My Father, edited by Page Smith (1976)
“It was my father’s strange conceit to write me a letter, the writing of which extended over a period of more than thirty years, and which, ultimately, reached ten thousand pages in length, a total …
The Unspeakable Scot, by T. W. H. Crosland (1902)
“This book is for Englishmen,” T. W. H. Crosland writes in his introduction to The Unspeakable Scotsman. “It is also in the nature of a broad hint for Scotchmen,” he adds, and the hint is …
Luxury Cruise, by Joseph Bennett (1962)
Reading Luxury Cruise is a bit like thumbing through issues of Holiday magazine, the glossy travel magazine of the 1950s. The look, the ads, the content — they all spell “M,000,000,000Ney.” The passengers aboard the …
Burden of the Seed, by Kathleen Sully (1958)
“It is impossible to stop reading Kathleen Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,” wrote one reviewer of Burden of the Seed. I completely agree: but having finished the …
The Intellectual Lover and Other Stories, by David Freedman (1940)
I have such hopes for The Intellectual Lover and other Stories, a collection of short stories written by David Freedman, a Romanian Jew who emigrated to the U.S. as a toddler, proved a prodigy at …
On Broome Stages by Clemence Dane: A Conversation with Kate Macdonald
A few months ago, Kate Macdonald, Visiting Fellow at the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, and I had a long dialogue on the subject of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which both of …
My Literary Life, by Mrs. Elizabeth Lynn Linton (1899)
Between John Sutherland’s wonderful encyclopedia, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, and the Internet Archive, I can lose hours wandering through the three-volumed forest of English 19th century fiction, particularly in the last year that …
A Martini on the Other Table, by Joyce Elbert (1963)
“Joyce Elbert had just turned thirty and divorced her second husband when she wrote this astonishing first novel … a daring story of a single woman’s frantic search for love in a loose living, free-wheeling …
Taking It Like a Woman, by Ann Oakley (1984)
“When I say I’m a feminist, what do I mean?” Ann Oakley asks near the end of Taking It Like a Woman. “I mean that I believe that women are an oppressed social group, a …