Book Society

Colonel and Mrs Williams , the owners of Parciau, were far from pleased at finding themselves and their lives portrayed in fiction. The novel, however, was again a Book Society Choice. It was...

The Ginger Griffin was a Book Society choice, as were three later novels by AB .

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. After its success on...

They Were Sisters too became a Book Society Choice. Sales before publication day passed 32,000, and the editor of Woman's Magazine said it was of course a masterpiece.DW was offered by Gaumont-British

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.

Its publication, however, was unmarked by any major review. It was the first novel by DW since her earliest of all not to be at least a Book Society Recommendation, if not a Choice. DW

This time The Spectator, pursuing the line of excessive modernist influence, called EHY a thicker-skinned Virginia Woolf . . . but hardly less bogged in the undifferentiated welter of phenomenal experience. This novel...

The novel was a Book Society choice, and received accolades from reviewers for its brilliantly successful attack on . . . the spiritual and physical relationship of married life.John Betjeman called 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...