Marghanita Laski

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Standard Name: Laski, Marghanita
Birth Name: Esther Pearl Laski
Nickname: Marghanita
Married Name: Esther Pearl Howard
Pseudonym: Sarah Russell
ML , a cultural force in twentieth-century Britain, published six novels, four biographies (one on multiple subjects), an anti-nuclear play, a collection of children's stories, three quasi-scientific investigations into secular and religious experiences, and various short stories, including a ghost story and an anti-nuclear fiction. She also edited various collections: poetry, children's stories, and essays on Charlotte Yonge . Her articles and book reviews appeared in the Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She also wrote three film scripts, co-authored a television series, and made a substantial contribution of quotations for the Oxford English Dictionary. ML 's novels address class issues and gender barriers, often satirically. They reflect the political, social, and economic anxieties and tensions felt in England during the Second World War and the Cold War. A self-professed atheist, ML wrote secular studies of ecstatic experiences.

Connections

Connections Author name Sort descending Excerpt
Friends, Associates Margaret Kennedy
Other women writers with whom MK established friendships included Lettice Cooper , Phyllis Bentley (who had also been at Cheltenham ), Marghanita Laski , Elizabeth Jenkins , and Rose Macaulay . These authors supported and...
Literary responses Margaret Kennedy
Friend and fellow author Marghanita Laski praised the novel, and specifically MK 's depiction of Oxford life through the flashbacks that Lucy and her best friend, Melissa, have on their university days. The novel was...
Textual Production Margaret Kennedy
Other notable women authors also contributed to this series, including three of MK 's writing friends: Lettice Cooper , Elizabeth Jenkins , and Marghanita Laski .
Powell, Violet. The Constant Novelist. W. Heinemann.
178
Reception Rudyard Kipling
Though Kipling's popularity during his lifetime and afterwards was immense, his identification with the ideology of Empire has kept him on the fringes of the academic canon. Marghanita Laski 's monograph about him, 1987 (which...
Literary responses Rosamond Lehmann
Virago paid a five-hundred-pound advance for each book in addition to royalties. Their first two RL titles each sold almost 20,000 copies within three years. It made her feel very peculiar to receive fan letters...
Friends, Associates Betty Miller
BM 's friends included Olivia Manning , Rosamond Lehmann , Stevie Smith , Inez Holden , Viola Meynell , and Eleanor Farjeon .
Miller, Sarah, and Betty Miller. “Introduction”. On the Side of the Angels, Virago, p. vii - xviii.
xv
In wartime she met and immediately took to Adrian Stephen ,...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
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...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
Initial comment included reviews or articles by A. S. Byatt and Marghanita Laski .
Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press.
198, 199
Orphia Jane Allen considers this work a thinly developed
Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press.
40
but effectively ironic, witty view of academia. Anne Wyatt-Brown
Literary responses Vita Sackville-West
British Book News took occasion to remark that VSW possessed an alert if somewhat superficial command of character.
British Book News. British Council.
(1953): 204
The Times Literary Supplement praised the book, but Marghanita Laski in The Observer was extremely cutting.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
375-6
Textual Production Mary Stott
Growing up the daughter of journalist parents, Mary Waddington (later MS ) was a journalist in her play as a small child. She told her dolls, I have some copy to write now.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Her first...
Literary responses Elizabeth Taylor
Reviews of A Game of Hide and Seek included high praise from Marghanita Laski and Elizabeth Bowen (some consolation to ET for her problems with her US publisher), but also carping which she found deeply...
Literary responses Mary Wesley
Early praise for MW 's work came from such different writers as Marghanita Laski and Susan Hill . Other commentators likened her work to that of Rose Macaulay , Elizabeth Bowen , Barbara Pym ...
Reception Charlotte Yonge
E. M. Delafield writes that during the 1940s CY retained wide popularity: that the London Library 's copies of her books were often checked out by readers, and that when Delafield wrote to the Times...

Timeline

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Texts

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