Highlights of the “lost” update (1 of 2)

One of the things I’ve sometimes had difficulty making time for in the past few years was the ongoing updating of my main list of authors. I’m always coming across (or being told about) authors who belong on the list, but getting around to researching them is something else. And even when I did find some time to do an update, as I did in May of 2022, the logistics were sometimes complicated. In this case, I managed to post the updated list, which included 160 new authors (nothing to sneeze at!), but then never got my act together enough to tell you about it and mention some of the highlights. Looking back now, that seems like a shame, so I’ve posted the complete list of new authors here, and I’m going to take two posts to talk about a few of the ones I found most interesting.

To show just how long this update has had to percolate, it includes at least three authors already introduced by me in reviews (and none of them very recently)…

Cover photo courtesy of Sarra Manning

MAUD BATCHELOR certainly deserves to be in print with her one and only novel, The Woman of the House (1934), a humorous, illustrated diary of the life of a well-to-do London lady, which I reviewed here. It turned out, after I’d written that review, that Batchelor was herself a "Lady"; her husband was Stanley Lockhart Batchelor, a High Court judge in India. I wish she had written more books.

ELENA SHAYNE was also a “one-hit wonder”, whose only novel, Everyday (1935), is a somewhat more poetic take on a Provincial Lady diary, tracing a young woman's life in rural England and, later, abroad with her aunt. I reviewed that one here and speculated at the time about the author's life, but scholar Elizabeth Crawford went much further and thoroughly (and fascinatingly) researched her—see here—even speaking with her daughter and identifying the village in Devon in which the novel is set and many of the real-life figures on which Shayne may have based her characters. Huge thanks to Elizabeth for such a plethora of information!

I also reviewed JANE SETH-SMITH’s Suite in Four Flats (1957) here early last year. All that glitters isn’t gold, but it was still fun to sample her work. Her other three novels were Three Suitors for Cassandra (1955), Love Thy Neighbours (1959), and The Laird and the Loch (1960). Sadly, although the Library of Congress provides a birth year for her, I’ve not been able to get any further in public records.

Another author patiently waiting quite a long time for inclusion in my list was MAUD CAIRNES, who had time to be rediscovered by Simon Thomas at Stuck in a Book and get back into print from his British Library Women Writers series before I managed to get her added to the list. Her first novel, Strange Journey (1935), is about a young middle class wife who begins to find herself switching bodies with an elegant member of the landed gentry. See Simon’s discussion of the book here. Her second novel, The Disappearing Duchess (1939), was apparently a more straightforward mystery. Cairns, whose real full name was Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Curzon-Herrick (née Hastings)(yowza‼), was the oldest daughter of the 14th Earl of Huntingdon and her husband's family had for centuries occupied the impressive Beaumanor Hall, which during WWII became a listening station in collaboration with Bletchley Park.

Often, in researching authors for my list, I either fairly quickly find some clues to their identity or else hit a wall and can locate nothing. But once in a while a really entertaining chase ensues, as was the case with novelist and children’s author MAY MARSHALL. Not only that, but I had the invaluable expert assistance of Hilary Clare, whom I contacted because of her deep knowledge of children’s authors. I have two of Marshall’s novels languishing unread on my TBR list—Impetuous Friend (1937), her first, about a schoolmistress in a high school, and Youth Storms In (1956), about a young war widow whose arrival in the lives of her older sisters-in-law wreaks havoc on their staid lives. She had worked as a trained nurse, and other titles include United Family (1952), about a doctor's family adjusting to postwar life, and Mulberry Leaf (1954), about the lives of hospital nurses. The real fun started with the fact that the British Library shows the author as "May Kathleen Marshall", but reviews included tidbits about her relocation to Chester in the 1950s and the fact that her son was prominent in the RAF, and those facts, and the piecing together of various records, led us instead to Evelyn May Marshall (1898-1971), whose son, Thomas Cedric, and his RAF adventures are discussed here, and whose entry in the 1939 England & Wales Register shows her profession as “Journalist / Editor / Author.”  Done and dusted! A big thanks to Hilary for sharing the fun of this quest with me.

Elsie Fry Laurence, aka Christine Field

Unlike Marshall, there are lots of authors who may remain mysteries forever, and when I first looked into the intriguing backstory of CHRISTINE FIELD's first novel it seemed she was one of these. The name was known to be a pseudonym, used on a single novel, Half a Gipsy (1916), set among Russian peasants. According to news stories of the time, the novel was submitted from Moscow as an entry in a contest sponsored by Andrew Melrose & Co. It didn’t win, but an editor later came across it and liked it, only to find that they were unable to trace the author. Their search, which garnered some publicity, resulted only in a visit from an anonymous Englishwoman who claimed the author was her adopted sister, who had gone to Russia as a governess. She reportedly refused to reveal more, and insisted that Field’s true identity should remain a mystery, with proceeds from the book going to the Red Cross. Another newspaper report suggested that the author had died of pneumonia in Canada. This is all the info I had when I made my update, which still shows her as unidentified, but it seems (see her entry for the Canada's Early Women Writers project here) that she is now known to have been Elsie Fry Laurence (1892-1982), who did not die young of pneumonia, but went on to become the mother-in-law of no lesser figure than novelist Margaret Laurence, who discusses Elsie fondly in her 1989 book Dance on the Earth. Elsie is known to have been a governess in Moscow before marrying and emigrating to Canada, and in fact she even, after much delay while raising her family, published a second novel, Bright Wings (1964), under her own name. It would be interesting to know why she and/or her relations were apparently eager to maintain her anonymity at the time the novel appeared. But at any rate, I already need to update my update, drat it.

On occasion, I get lucky and come across or am contacted by a relative or other connection of an author. This happened with JOAN O’DONOVAN, an author who seems really astonishingly forgotten considering the acclaim her books received when they first appeared. I was happily able to get in touch with her son, who provided wonderful details about her life. O’Donovan published four novels and three story collections in all. The Visited (1959, aka A Singular Passion) deals with an unmarried woman in her 50s who becomes obsessed with marrying a shady fellow traveler on a tour of Ireland. The Middle Tree (1961), about a young teacher at an impoverished school and her flirtation with a Communist colleague and his ideas, presumably draws from O'Donovan's own experiences as a teacher before WWII (her son notes that she reported her profession as "writer" instead of "teacher" when she joined the WAAFs as teaching was a reserved profession and she wanted to escape it). She, Alas! (1965) focuses on a woman in her 50s who is publicly a widow though she never actually married the man she still mourns. And in Argument with an East Wind (1986), a woman of 60 reaches a turning point upon losing her job and her lover. Her story collections are Dangerous Worlds (1958), Shadows on the Wall (1960), and The Niceties of Life (1964). During and for a time after WWII, O'Donovan was in a relationship with Michael Francis O'Donovan, better known to readers as Frank O'Connor, and adopted his name. Later, she settled in Dordogne, France, and for some time provided a home and care for author David Garnett in his declining years. According to the author's son, among her unpublished work are an additional collection of stories assembled in the 1980s, a travel book focused on the Dordogne, and drafts and notes for an additional novel, The Prism, never completed. Many thanks to Oliver O'Donovan for his kind assistance and information about his mother.

And while I’m writing about authors with connections to at least somewhat better-known writers, it took this many years of researching to come across the tidbit that Lettice Cooper, author of The New House, reprinted by Virago, and National Provincial, reprinted by Persephone, had not one but two siblings who also published novels. Her brother, Leonard Cooper, doesn’t belong on my list (Y chromosome, obviously), but BARBARA COOPER certainly does. She published three novels—Sweet Chariot (1931), subtitled "The Story of a Coward" and apparently set during the American Civil War, Two Walk Together (1935), about which details are lacking except that the publisher described it as about "the clash between sophistication and an open-air country life", and The Light of Other Days (1939), in which an elderly man reminisces about his youth during the Regency, including cameos from Lord Byron, Caroline Lamb, and John Keats. The latter seems to have been the most widely and positively reviewed. Barbara and her sister lived together in London for much of their adult lives.

Lettice Rathbone

Speaking of Lettices, no less (what are the chances?), there’s LETTICE RATHBONE, whose first novel, about a young woman's search for happiness in the English countryside, London, and Europe, bears the irresistible title Occupation: Spinster (1935). (I have it, but haven’t read it—yadda yadda yadda.) Her second and last, Autumn Adventure (1940), was about the unusual friendship between a spoiled boy and his mother's middle-aged house guest. Rathbone spent much of her life in Smarden, Kent, and I give warm thanks to the Smarden Heritage Center for their help in confirming her identity. Among other films of interest that organization has available online is one focused on Rathbone's own recollections of World War II in the village—see here.

The earliest novels of JOAN HENRY—This Many Summers (1947), Commit to Memory (1948), and Crimson Lake (1950)—have been called romances, but the first at least sounds like it has a slight edge: "A love story in the Michael Arlen manner; scintillating and brittle, set against a background of bookies' odds and the chink of ice in a barman's mixer." They could be intriguing, or not? Her later work gets rather more serious; after spending eight months in Holloway prison on forgery charges, she published the bestselling Who Lie in Gaol (1952) about her life in prison, followed by a novel, Yield to the Night (1954), about a woman awaiting execution. The former inspired the film The Weak and the Wicked (1953), and the latter was made into a film in 1956, for which Henry co-wrote the screenplay and received a BAFTA nomination. Of particular interest to me was the fact that, in addition to more screenwriting, Henry also penned the play Look on Tempests (1960), the first play dealing with the topic of homosexuality after the Lord Chamberlain's ban on the subject was lifted the year before, the cast of which in its first production included Vanessa Redgrave and Gladys Cooper. Henry's second husband was film director John Lee Thompson, whose films included The Guns of Navarone and the original Cape Fear.

Another one-hit wonder with good connections is RACHEL CECIL, whose one novel, Theresa's Choice (1958), about a young woman juggling three men in her search for a husband, does intrigue me. A review in the Indianapolis Star says: "As Theresa roams the coils and pitfalls of romantic entanglements, Lady Cecil takes her and us on a glorious tour of English social life of the early 30s." Cecil was the daughter of literary critic Desmond MacCarthy and the wife of Oxford professor and literary scholar Lord David Cecil.

Reprint edition of Barbara Fitzgerald's first novel

And wrapping up this first post of highlights is another author who was already rediscovered by a publisher long before I got round to her. BARBARA FITZGERALD was the Irish author of two novels, We Are Besieged (1946) and Footprints Upon Water (1983), both dealing with "big house" life in Ireland during and after the unrest of the 1910s and 1920s. They were both reprinted by Somerville Press in the early 2010s, to considerable acclaim, and are therefore relatively readily available.

Next time, 17 more authors of potential interest from my year-and-a-half old update (running a year and a half behind isn’t really all that bad for me…), including a number whose works I’ve either already sampled or plan to “soon” (yadda yadda yadda).