Sometimes you see news about an exciting book coming out, and then you realise you have a year to wait. Well, not today friends – I’m going to tell you about the four new British Library Women Writers novels, and two of them are coming out this month! And the other two are coming out next month! Basically what I’m saying is, put your preorders in now and you won’t have long before you can be knee-deep in these books. [In the UK, that is… they’re next year in other countries, I think, though of course you can ship them elsewhere.]
Obviously I love all the books in this series, and all but the first two have been titles I’ve suggested for reprinting – including these four – but this batch is particularly special to me. There is one book here that I’m particularly excited to see people discovering. ANYWAY on with the announcement…
Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs
This is the one I’m most thrilled about, I think – because it had disappeared almost completely before this edition, and deserves to be so much more widely known. You might remember I raved about it last year, and it ended up on my favourite books of 2020.
Sally is a delightful heroine, coming back to her childhood village with the prospect of marrying the local bank manager – but gets in a love triangle with a widow. The thing I love is that the women aren’t pitted against each other – they both agree that the bank manager is awful, but want the security that comes with a ring – and play fair to see who’ll win. It’s such a joyful, funny novel, but also one with a lot to say about the situation of women in the 1910s.
Which Way? by Theodora Benson
I had only been able to read this in the Bodleian Library before – it has hitherto been very hard to find, and is a wonderfully innovative novel – especially for its time, the 1930s. The heroine is invited to three different weekends away – and the novel is split into sections looking at what would have happened if she had taken those three different invitations. It’s cleverly and engagingly done.
A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse
I know this novel has long been on people’s wishlists to be reprinted, and I was so happy when the clever people at the British Library managed to secure the rights. It’s a fictionalised version of the Thompson/Bywaters case – but you don’t need me to persuade you it’s brilliant, as coincidentally Lucy Scholes has just written a wonderful piece about it in the Paris Review.
The Love Child by Edith Olivier
If you’ve been reading StuckinaBook for a while, you’ve probably seen me mention this one – it was one of the first titles I suggested to the British Library, and I’m delighted that it’s now on the list. One of my favourite books, it was also one of the central texts for my DPhil – so you can imagine I had a lot to say in the afterword. In the novel, Agatha is a lonely spinster who accidentally conjures her imaginary childhood best friend Clarissa into life. What starts out a joyful bizarrity becomes something darker as a power struggle develops. It’s a super short novel, so we’ve also included excerpts from Olivier’s autobiography in the book.
So glad to tell you all about these now – which appeals the most??