Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marghanita Laski
-
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.
"Marghanita Laski" by Sasha / Stringer,1934-06-13.Retrieved from https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/english-novelist-and-critic-marghanita-laski-niece-of-news-photo/3365682.
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
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, 1984.
375-6
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, 1994.
Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press, 1994.
40
but effectively ironic, witty view of academia. Anne Wyatt-Brown
Literary responses
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The American reviews were highly flattering. The reviewer for the Boston Transcript could think of no more powerful work from a woman's hand in the English language, not even George Eliot
at her best.
qtd. in
Gerzina, Gretchen. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
67
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...
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...
Textual Production
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The story that FHB
had told in Sara Crewe; or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's remained in her mind after the publication of that book. She reworked and expanded it over a period of years...
Textual Production
Margaret Kennedy
MK
's study of the craft of fiction writing, The Outlaws on Parnassus, was published by Marghanita Laski
's husband, John Howard
, of the Cresset Press
.
Powell, Violet. The Constant Novelist. W. Heinemann, 1983.
199
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, 1983.
178
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.
qtd. in
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, 1990.
Her first...
Textual Production
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Her ten anthologiesedited during the 1920s (some of them under pseudonyms such as Leonard Gray) had some significance for the writing of that decade, since they incorporated contributions from, for instance, Marghanita Laski
,...
Textual Production
Georgette Heyer
GH
's Regency romance Charity Girl was on this day both published and made the basis for a notoriously hostile analysis of Heyer's work in The Times by Marghanita Laski
.
Laski, Marghanita. “The appeal of Georgette Heyer”. Times, 1 Oct. 1970, p. 16.