Back in England in 2007, David Lassman
(director of the Austen Festival in Bath and a would-be novelist with a pile of rejection slips) mounted an experiment, submitting the openings of Austen novels, blind, to...
Reception
Stevie Smith
Naomi Mitchison
praised this collection in a review for Time and Tide from which a friendship developed.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz, 1979.
153-4
Looking back in 1979 Mitchison
characterised Smith's style as witty, full of meaning, one-off from a packed...
Reception
Radclyffe Hall
Sir William Joynson-Hicks
, Home Secretary, wrote to order Jonathan CapeJonathan Cape
to discontinue publication of RH
's The Well of Loneliness, calling it inherently obscene and gravely detrimental to the public interest.
qtd. in
Cline, Sally. Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John. John Murray, 1997.
247
Cline, Sally. Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John. John Murray, 1997.
395n10
Reception
Radclyffe Hall
Police raided London booksellers and Jonathan Cape
's offices, seizing both Cape
and Pegasus Press
editions of The Well.
Cline, Sally. Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John. John Murray, 1997.
253
Reception
Barbara Pym
Larkin argued that Pym give[s] an unrivalled picture of a small section of middle-class post-war England.
“Reputations Revisited”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 3906, 21 Jan. 1977, pp. 66-7.
66
Cecil stated that her unpretentious, subtle, accomplished novels, especially Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings, are...
Reception
Mary Webb
MW
's friend Caradoc Evans
(who called her the greatest living woman novelist and understood how hungry she was for success) recorded her envy of an unnamed countryside woman novelist who was savouring her own...
Textual Features
Naomi Mitchison
This fictionalises NM
's life at Carradale, including her dismissal from the Argyll County Council
. She expresses her disillusionment with the Highlanders, and divides herself between two characters, a middle-aged woman doctor and...
Textual Production
Stevie Smith
SS
's first collection of poetry, A Good Time Was Had by All, was published by Jonathan Cape
, with her own spiky drawings.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983.
Poems: A Joking Word, which had begun under the title Here Beyond, was published in London by Cape
(as was Experts Are Puzzled, a book of essays and stories which LR
had...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Bowen
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (seventy-nine pieces) were published posthumously by Jonathan Cape
.