Book Society

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...

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

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. She took part in the Book Society while she lived...

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...

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...

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...

At the outset of her career, in the years following Marriage of Harlequin, magazines paid her fantastic prices for short stories. This, at the time, meant twenty-five pounds or more. On one occasion...

Again she felt sure the book would be a failure, judging it not properly thought out in the beginning, about nothing—stale, flat. Nevertheless she giggled at the thought of it as a defective offspring...

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...