Book Society

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Friends, Associates	Susanna Watts	In her own more local circle, however, SW was relaxed and good company. She belonged to a Book Society . She was a close friend of the Hutton and the Coltman families and especially, in...
Literary responses	Ivy Compton-Burnett	Leonard Woolf's decision proved a mistake. The book was not only praised to the skies by young, advanced reviewers, but also made the secondary Book of the Month for May by the newly-formed Book Society
Occupation	Caroline Frances Cornwallis	CFC led an active life. She remarked that the political unrest of 1822 affected her because she had ordinarily my father's business to transact. Cornwallis, Caroline Frances. Selections from the Letters of Caroline Frances Cornwallis. Editor Power, M. C., Trübner and Co., 1864. 33 She took part in the Book Society while she lived...
Occupation	Pamela Frankau	She participated in Brains Trusts, both on the famous BBC television programme and as a charity event for the Cenacle Convent in Hampstead. She read books for the Book Society jury, but found this...
Occupation	Rumer Godden	While living in Highgate RG took to organizing readings: at Foyles bookshop, promoting young poets; at Kenwood House; and for the Arts Council , where she spent two years on the Poetry Panel...
Occupation	Pamela Hansford Johnson	PHJ worked occasionally for the BBC from the late 1940s. She later became one of the Critics team (which meant regular recording sessions), and sat on the committee of the Book Society , which she...
Publishing	Pamela Frankau	At the outset of her career, in the years following Marriage of Harlequin, magazines paid her fantastic prices for short stories. Stern, G. B. . And did he stop and speak to you?. Henry Regnery, 1958. 118 This, at the time, meant twenty-five pounds or more. On one occasion...
Publishing	Dorothy Whipple	Again she felt sure the book would be a failure, judging it not properly thought out in the beginning, about nothing—stale, flat. Whipple, Dorothy. Random Commentary. Michael Joseph, 1966. 22 Nevertheless she giggled at the thought of it as a defective offspring...
Reception	Olivia Manning	This novel was a Book Society choice (OM 's third), but was badly reviewed by Nancy Spain and Viola Garvin . Braybrooke, Neville, and Isobel English. Olivia Manning: A Life. Chatto and Windus, 2004. 157-8
Reception	Lady Cynthia Asquith	The volume was a Book Society recommendation. Beauman, Nicola. Cynthia Asquith. Hamish Hamilton, 1987. 325 Roger Fulford , reviewing it for the Times Literary Supplement, situated it among a crowd of works looking back from difficult times to an easier and...
Reception	Evelyn Waugh	This novel was a Book Society choice. Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. It brought Waugh hundreds of thousands of new American readers, and, astonishingly to him, fan-mail. Stovel, Bruce, and Bruce Stovel. “The Genesis of Evelyn Waughs Comic Vision. Waugh, Captain Grimes, and Decline and FallJane Austen and Company: Collected Essays, edited by Nora Foster Stovel and Nora Foster Stovel, University of Alberta Press, 2011, pp. 181-0. 182 In early 1946 Life magazine carried his article entitled Fan-Fare, in...
Reception	Nancy Mitford	This enormously successful was also well reviewed. It was a Book Society Choice, and earned NM over £7,000 in the first six months, funding her move from England to Paris. Hastings, Selina. Nancy Mitford: A Biography. Hamish Hamilton, 1985. 168 Fraser, Antonia. “A Most Superior Street”. Spectator.co.uk. Champagne for the brain. After its success on...
Reception	Ann Bridge	The Ginger Griffin was a Book Society choice, as were three later novels by AB .
Reception	Nancy Mitford	Love in a Cold Climate enjoyed great popularity. It was the first novel to be simultaneously chosen as Book of the Month by the Book Society , the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard. Mitford, Nancy. “Critical Materials”. Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley, Hodder and Stoughton, 1993, p. various pages. 200
Reception	Angela Thirkell	It was chosen Book of the Month by the Book Society . Strickland, Margot. Angela Thirkell: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. Duckworth, 1977. 108

Timeline

By April 1929

The Book Society (first conceived of by Arnold Bennett ) was launched by Hugh Walpole with himself as chairman; it was the first such society in Britain.

Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.

Feather, John. A History of British Publishing. Croom Helm, 1988.

187-8

1930

The Book Guild was funded, on the model of the Book Society of the previous year, to cater to the needs of the intelligent but not academic (middle-brow) reader.

Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. “’She must be a very good novelist’: Rereading E. H. Young (1880-1949)”. English Studies in Canada, Vol.

, No. 3, Sept. 2001, pp. 303-31.

305

1944

Hodder and Stoughton , along with Alan Bott of the Book Society , founded Pan Books Limited , with Aubrey Forshaw as the managing director.

Rose, Jonathan, and Patricia J. Anderson, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 112. Gale Research, 1991.

244

Mumby, Frank Arthur, and Ian Norrie. Mumby’s Publishing and Bookselling in the Twentieth Century. 6th ed., Bell and Hyman, 1982.

Texts

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