Book Society

This was the first book LR published with the new firm of Arthur Barker in London. She took some trouble to disguise identities, since Barker was worried about potential libel actions. The Book Society backed...

She wrote it in 1946, and revised it in a state of dissatisfaction with her first version. Chatto and Windus were enthusiastic about it and offered her an advance of £150 and a royalty of...

LC 's Fenny (a Book Society choice, and sometimes called her finest novel), was set in or near Florence during the Second World War and the years just before and after it.

The sales of this second novel nearly doubled those of Pym's first: Excellent Women sold 5,477 copies in the two months to June 1952, while Some Tame Gazelle sold only 3,722 in the thirteen years...

Diary of a Provincial Lady received positive reviews, though some critics also drew attention to its limitations. Henry Seidel Canby praised EMD in The Saturday Review of Literature as one of the really skilful novelists...

Woolf reported reading the novel all in a gulp with pleasure in bed; very well done I think. It was a Book Society Choice, recommended by Clemence Dane and Hugh Walpole , and...

This novel was chosen a Book Society recommendation (of which between six and ten were selected per month); it was not the choice of the month, since the panel felt it was too morbid—deeply...

Reviews were highly positive. The Sunday Times said that PFuses a large canvas with great deftness, and her dialogue is a joy.John o'London's mentioned her near-genius for story-telling, and the Observer...

Recommended by the Book Society and the Book Guild , The Southern Gates of Arabia also received high praise in the Daily Telegraph, among other papers. FS , rather surprisingly, was compared to Jane Austen

The reviewer in British Book News wrote: This admirable volume forms a valuable complement to [Smyth's] own autobiographical works, which are minor masterpieces of English prose. The biography became a Book Society book...

RG herself had misgivings about Gypsy, Gypsy, but her publisher Peter Llewelyn Davies wrote of being enchanted by the story.Spencer Curtis Brown pointed out that it owed a debt to D. H. Lawrence

It was chosen Book of the Month by the Book Society .

South Riding was enormously successful. It was chosen by the Book Society as their Book of the Month for March, and sold 25,000 copies within the first three weeks of its publication. In 1937 it...

The novel was a Book Society Choice. Writing in 2010 on the influence of the media on British Prime Ministers, Ferdinand Mount observed: pretty much all you need to know about...

The Hidden River had some bad reviews in influential places, but excellent sales. It was a Book Society choice, earning £2,500 in English royalties, £268 from Book-of-the-Month Club in Canada, and a dollar amount...