Book Society

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...

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...

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

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.

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...