It’s hard to know where to start. It’s gratifying when Bertie eliminates something solid close to a bin. It is less pleasing when I climb thirty-six stairs to bed with a PG Wodehouse and find I read Spring Fever recently.
So I picked its predecessor, Full Moon, off the shelf and was intrigued by the pencil notes inside my shabby 1st edition, a bargain at £7.50. Stella Gibbons is not a forgotten author; I don’t think Cold Comfort Farm has been out of print since it was published in 1932; a good year for novels. Norah Lofts and Elizabeth Goudge are less well known, unless I have been living in 20th century permafrost, literary Siberia, for fifty years. Norah had forty-six novels and a handful of short stories published – and some non-fiction. Her genre is, in the main, historical fiction and murder-mysteries. Are they worth reading today, do they have legs? I don’t know but she was a best seller in her day (1904 – 1983).
Elizabeth Goudge’s (1900 – 1984) story for children, The Little White Horse, has been cited by JK Rowling as as one of her favourite books and one of only a few with a direct influence on her Harry Potter books. It was Goudge’s favourite book too and won her a Carnegie Medal in 1946. While she was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature she was also a founding member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in 1960. Maybe more Rosie M Banks than Ruth Rendell?
So, there are two forgotten novelists and now here’s a third and this is a book I have read this week.
Forgotten maybe but worth reading. This is a Second World War novel set in London in the Blitz. The principal character has a complicated marriage and a difficult job working as an unpaid civil servant. It is, if you read his Wikipedia entry, autobiographical and a good read. Others seem to agree.
Then I turned to the next page of Full Moon. If she, it must be a she, was writing for posterity she has to a small extent had success.
