Carmen Callil

DW was an unacknowledged favourite of Ivy Compton-Burnett and evidently of Elizabeth Taylor too, since Taylor borrowed for her novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont from the opening of a story among Whipple's papers, which...

AW made several new friends during her seventies. They included Sorbonne professor Gabriel Boucé , the German poet Fred Marnau and his wife Senta , the novelist Kate O'Brien , and the actress Elizabeth Sprigge

The idea was that AW should write the introduction herself. The effort to write it plunged her, said Carmen Callil , in pain so great . . . it twisted her body. Callil wrote...

Callil felt that this novel (a classic—funny, wonderfully written, which was pressed into her hands by Michael Holroyd in 1977) was the first to cast light on her own convent upbringing in Sydney, Australia...

This was the first novel she wrote after moving from Bristol to London. It went on to a further change of title in the United States, where it appeared in 1927 as The...