Duckworth

BB began working as a part-time clerk for the publishing firm Gerald Duckworth , where Colin Haycraft and his wife Anna (the writer Alice Thomas Ellis ) provided invaluable advice for her writing career.

The four shillings and sixpence an hour she earned in this job went to supplement her payment from Duckworth of a little over seven pounds a week.

With her publishers, Duckworth , in financial difficulties in 1989, exacerbated by embarking on misconceived and expensive publicity schemes, BB often acted as go-between for Colin Haycraft and his potential, competing backers Roger Shashoua and...

She had completed this novel nearly two years before publication. It appeared while she was in the uncomfortable condition of owing nearly a hundred and sixty pounds to her agent, because of the size of...

The married couple Colin Haycraft and Alice Thomas Ellis (herself a writer) both worked at Gerald Duckworth publishers, and met BB while she was working there as a clerk. They taught her to write properly...

While marginally less productive, BB continued during the 1980s to publish novels in a similar vein to her earlier ones. All through this decade she continued to find it difficult to manage her literary income...

This was the first book she had published since the death of Colin Haycraft and after a determined attempt had been made to lure her away from Duckworth to Viking. The final offer made...

BB was by now a highly marketable commodity as novelists go. Her recent three-book publishing agreement brought her £78,000 up front—almost certainly less than she could have got by bargaining, and even called by...