Highlights of the 2024 update (1 of 4)

I know I've been woefully slack about writing reviews lately—even though I do have some books to tell you about—but that doesn't mean I haven't been working my little fingers to the bone for you. I've had two projects I've been focusing lots of attention on—a new update to my main writers list, and, as I mentioned in a recent review, a thorough revamping and expansion of my aged and decrepit Mystery List. I've been reeling drunkenly back and forth between these projects for the past several months. When I mentioned them recently, it looked like the Mystery List would be finished first, but, perhaps just to be perverse with even my own expectations, I've now finished the list update instead. Such is life. But the Mystery List will, if all goes according to plan, come along in due course.

The new update includes 130 new authors, and the new total number of authors is 2,391. And, of course, still no end in sight. Practically every time I search for information about one author, I come across one or two more who must be added to my "to research" list. And yet, I'm still coming across numerous really intriguing authors, including some whose work was quite acclaimed in their day. Of the 130 new additions, I've singled out 50 that I found of particular interest, and I'll dedicate four posts to sharing them with you.

The work of this new batch of authors includes a surprising amount of cheerful romance (which, as you know, seems to be my particular addiction), but it also happily included a sudden small surge of Irish additions to the list, which is likely long overdue. In this first highlights post, I'm focused on six authors who penned works focused on war—four who wrote about World War II, and two who focused on World War I—and on several authors who proved intriguingly difficult to identify or to fully document.

First up, an author who actually falls into both groups. ANONYMOUS WAAC was the pseudonym used for four novels (clearly identified as such by their publisher, as opposed to memoirs) detailing a young woman’s experiences as a WAAC during and after World War I. WAAC: The Woman's Story of the War (1930) was praised for its realism about the tragedies of war, but also seems to have had a significant romantic component, and ends, fairy-tale like, with the heroine inheriting a fortune from her beau who is killed in service. WAAC Demobilized, published later in 1930, shows her jet-setting with numerous admirers to forget her past sorrows, and finally settling down to a be a fabulously successful businesswoman in France, and My Journey's End (1932) and Hell Triumphant! (1935) round out her story. Of course, she might well not be British at all, but until someone trawls through the archives of her publisher, T. Werner Laurie, to find the author’s true identity, we can’t be sure.

BERNADETTE MURPHY is (presumably) one of the newly-added Irish authors. I haven't fully identified her, but the settings of her three novels suggest Irish origins, though a copyright notice says she was living in London in 1934. Her final novel, The Unwilling Player (1935), features a group of children at a country house writing a fairy play, only to be interrupted by World War I; after the war, they become entangled in circumstances that echo the plot of their play. Her other two works of fiction don't seem to have a specific connection to the war. The House in the Country (1927) deals with “ordinary happenings in an old country house in the West of Ireland, seen through the eyes of a little girl” and was compared to Proust for its observation of intimate details. And An Unexpected Guest (1934) has an element of magic or time travel to it, as a mature, very sophisticated woman revisits her childhood home in Ireland. 

Journalist and novelist Leonora Eyles was an early addition to my author list, but I had no idea until now that her daughter, Vivyan Leonora Eyles, was also an author, publishing four novels under the pseudonym LYDIA HOLLAND. The Evil Days Come Out (1947) is about the love and passions of an Englishwoman living in Rome during World War II. The Stepson (1952) is about the relationship of an Englishwoman and a German refugee from Hitler, and the challenges presented by his teenage son from his previous wife, who has grown up in Germany during war and occupation. I could find no details about The Initial Error (1960), but The Honeyed Life (1961) features "elegant and intelligent people" in a Greek setting: "Even the less estimable characters with their peculiar perversions and preoccupations have a certain dignity." She was also a translator from Italian and German (including Alberto Moravio). Holland married an Italian in 1934 and lived in Italy throughout World War II. Her mother’s book, For My Enemy Daughter (1941), was composed of wartime letters she wrote to her but could not send.

PRUNELLA BECKETT wrote three novels with Yorkshire settings. One House Divided (1935) is a tragic tale of two sisters whose mother lives in the past, who both set their hats for a young man who could be their ticket out. The other two have war themes. Annamoor (1945) is about a young man crippled in WWII, whose wife’s adoring sympathy leads to tragedy. And in The Crescent (1952), the author, a review said, “"has taken an upper middle class family and drawn with startling penetration character studies of its members in 1927, 1940, and 1947." In the Rupert Hart-Davis archive, there are letters from Beckett to RHD regarding the possibility that her father, Sir William Gervase Beckett, a banker and politician, was also his own, illegitimate, father.

DAPHNE SLEE published two novels, both having to do with the Royal Air Force. That Great Hunter (1951) deals with a Polish pilot who ends up in command of a British bomber squadron in World War II. The Poor Wise Man (1952) is set postwar and focuses on the relationship of a former Battle of Britain pilot and a frustrated young girl. Presumably, she is also the Daphne Slee who published a volume of poetry in 1963. A 1951 article says she had taught English to Polish pilots and was herself in the Auxiliary Air Force at that time.

I already introduced ELLA MONCKTON here a while back, reviewing her fun family holiday novel August in Avilion (1940), but she's just finally been added to the main list. She was a children's author and the wife of artist and illustrator Clifford Webb, who illustrated some of her work. Many of her children’s titles are for younger children, but The Gates Family (1934), surely a tongue-in-cheek autobiographical look at life in an unconventional artistic family, is for older children, and August in Avilion is a sequel of sorts. I only just discovered that she also wrote another adult novel, The Place Where They Belong (1952), which is set in the immediate postwar, with a family returning to their village after wartime separation and finding both village and each other changed. Other books for older children are Left Till Called For (1937), about a girl on the run from her boarding school, and The Key and the Chest (1957), another holiday story and a treasure hunt on a family estate dating back to William the Conqueror. 

Now to my authors who for one reason or another went beyond my abilities to trace them in public records. I've really almost identified M. SHIRLEY GRANT, who published a single novel, Elizabeth Holds Forth (1930), written in the form of a diary “kept during a short period in which many incidents, mainly romantic, came into the life of a discerning girl.” An article of the time gives us her family in Maidstone (her brother Bernhard Shirley Henniker Grant was a well-known philatelist), but there are two sisters, Edith Marjorie and Doris Maud, who could be the source of the “M" (and two more sisters without Ms, if it’s a sort of pseudonym). It's perhaps most likely to be Edith (17 Feb 1894 – 22 May 1968), who on the 1939 England & Wales Register is a teacher and owner of a school.

Then there's EVA LATHBURY, author of five novels that were often praised (and sometimes critiqued) for their clever, philosophical dialogue. In Mr. Meyer's Pupil (1907), the heroine is a governess who, under the influence of modern beliefs, gets caught up in the dramas of her employer. The People Downstairs (1908, published in the U.S. as The Long Gallery) was summed up by a skeptical critic: "the story of two girls, both of whom enter the married state, and have all manner of philosophical discussions with themselves and—what is far worse—with other people about the state of their affections and the like. … The worst of it is that they are all so very much alike in their brilliance." Other critics praised it enthusiastically, however. The Sinking Ship (1909) is about a 40-ish actress confronting her advancing age, her daughter who is growing into a beauty herself, and her mother who at 70 is in full denial of her age, as well as the brilliant young playwright whose new work is meant to be her next big achievement. The Moving Camp (1911), set largely in Dresden and Manchester, features a young singer determined to inspire and control the lives of an ordinary family in Manchester according to her own "artistic" principles. And The Shoe Pinches (1912) sees a wise mother guiding her children past their modern ideals. A copyright notice says it’s her real name and she was living in London, and she's even listed in Who Was Who in Literature 1906-1934, which gives her address as “Ingledene, Buxton,” but sadly that still leaves two or three likely suspects in the records and no final clue to determine which is the author.

Someone somewhere must know about E. M. WALKER, who published a single novel, God Loves the Franks (1927), set in a French boarding school for soldier’s daughters and focused on three young teachers who have very different destinies ahead. A contemporary review asserts that the author is definitely a woman, and a signed copy available online gives her first name as Ethel, but no other details have been found. It seems likely that she is the same E. M. Walker who translated works from French, and there was also a composer by that name, but I couldn't get additional leads. If she was a translator and composer as well, there must be some local knowledge of her somewhere…

And the last two authors in this post were also "one hit wonders" and also remain unidentified. CATRIONA MACNICOL published The Beautiful Moment (1929), a romantic comedy about a Scottish girl rebelling against her stodgy upbringing by accepting a governess post with a Swiss family; the name could be a pseudonym, but I haven’t come across enough detail to identify her. And FRANCES WOODHOUSE published Country Holiday (1935), about "an extremely shy young doctor who misses the happiest things in life, but manages to make a good business of it after all." No clues to track her down either.

It would be astonishing if any of you reading this post in March 2024 happened to have information about these mystery women, but down the road a great-niece or grandson, or even someone happening across a publisher's contract, may stumble across this post and make the connection—"He's talking about Great Aunt Catriona!" Fingers crossed.