The UTTERLY hopeless wish list

In 2013, not long after I began blogging, I made my first Hopeless Wish List, having already developed the first symptoms of my all-consuming obsession with the most obscure of obscure authors. But not, as it happens, having quite fine-tuned my interlibrary loan and/or savvy book shopping skills. Nor, for sure, had I made contact with a host of fellow aficionados who have since made it possible, in various ways, for me to read some of my most-yearned-for titles.

I updated the list in 2014 (I can't believe it's been that long!), but that one is long out of date too. It's therefore time to do a new Hopeless Wish List, and needless to say I have significantly upped the ante on exactly what it means for a book to be "hopeless"! But based on past experience, it's worth my while to make a list of my most coveted titles, on the off chance that someone somewhere someday will say, "Hey! I have a copy of that you can borrow/buy/have!" It could happen (and has before). Plus, I wanted to organize the list in order to create Abe Books "wants" for them, so I might just as well share it. And for those of you who have trouble finding a lot of the books I write about, an added benefit is that it may provide a wry comfort to see that there are books I can't get hold of either...

In case anyone but me is curious, at the bottom of this post I'll also do a summary of the titles from the previous versions of my list which have been, in one way or another, removed from the realm of the hopeless. But first, without further ado, here are the new additions to my greatest hits of hopelessness:

(It's hard to prioritize these books, a) because I would jump on any one of them in a moment, and b) because some I know a fair amount about and others I have only small tantalizing tidbits about, but of course it could be the latter which turn out to be the real treasures.)

P. Y. BETTS, French Polish (1933)

Could this one—the one and only novel by an author better known for her acclaimed memoir People Who Say Goodbye (1989), reprinted a few years ago by Slightly Foxed—be one of those treasures? French Polish is mentioned here as "a funny and sharply observed novel about a girls’ finishing school", which is more than enough to sell me on it. But try looking for a copy of it.

E. M. CHANNON, The Surprising Holidays (1926)

I've read several of Channon's books, including the mysteries Twice Dead and The Chimney Murder, which were reprinted by Greyladies, and a very enjoyable school story, The Honour of the House. But ever since I read a piece about Channon by Hilary Clare, this is the one I've most wanted to get hold of. Clare said it was among the funniest of Channon's works, and summed up its plot as "the lack of domestic capability of an English middle-class family." Books to Treasure has released several of her school-related stories in e-book and paperback, so why why WHY haven't they got round to this much harder-to-find book?!?!

PRISCILLA JOHNSTON, The Narrow World (1930) & Green Girl (1931)

These two novels, the latter a sequel to the former, come from my Grownup School Story List, just like the Betts title above. Both appear to be set in schools, and the latter includes a romance between a young girl and one of the masters at her school. Other details are elusive, and an Abe Books search for either is unlikely to bear any fruit.

DOROTHY LAMBERT, Fish Out of Water (1937) & Much Dithering (1938)

These could truly be either trash or treasure, as I know practically nothing about them or about Lambert herself, but the titles are irresistible and they are seductively unavailable.  Who could resist a title like Much Dithering?! (A part of me, I admit, really hopes that it turns out to be the name of a country estate: "We're walking over to Much Dithering this afternoon to have tea with Lady Smythe-Hyde-Barrington-Thorne-Babbington.")

MARGARET RIVERS LARMINIE & JANE LANGSLOW, Gory Knight (1937)

At least we know a fair amount about this one, and as of this writing a single copy is actually available on Abe Books, should you wish to invest a cool $1,000 on it (!!). A parody of the detective genre (the title is of course a wry homage to Sayers), in which caricatures of the most famous detectives of the day gather at the home of one Miss Pyke and are drawn into the mystery of a kitchen maid's disappearance. Mystery guru Martin Edwards even wrote a piece about it here, about reading and discussing the book with fellow mystery writer Margaret Yorke. I can't imagine why no one has reprinted this by now—perhaps there's a rights issue?

HILDA HEWETT, The Desert Shall Rejoice (1950)

I've written about Hewett here, having been lucky enough to track down several of her books from libraries. She's a classic hit-or-miss kind of author, and in truth I'd be willing to sample any of her other titles if they could be found, but my two favorites of her books so far are Kaleidoscope (1947) and So Early One Morning (1948). I know absolutely nothing about The Desert Shall Rejoice, but the three books have in common that they're the only three Hewett published with Hurst & Blackett, who seem (perhaps?) to have given her a bit more freedom and encouragement than her usual publisher, the more romance-oriented Robert Hale.

MONICA REDLICH, Cheap Return (1934), No Love Lost (1937), & The Various Light (1948)

I had had Redlich on my author list for a couple of years before even discovering that she had written adult novels in addition to her two (slightly better-known) children's books, Jam Tomorrow (1937) and Five Farthings (1939), the latter of which I reviewed here. I'll bet a lot of fans of those books don't realize it either. Cheap Return was described by one critic as "entertaining because of its gentle satire and its lively presentation of life in a girls' college," which is more than enough to make me crave it. No Love Lost gets the briefest of critical mentions as "a simply-told story of the reactions of a schoolgirl to the unhappy marriage of her parents." And of The Various Light I know nothing except that Carl Jung, of all people, particularly recommended it to a friend of his (which is certainly enough to arouse curiosity—did he enjoy the novel, do we think, or merely find it of psychoanalytic interest? Either way I'm sold). Are these three novels as charming and entertaining as her children's fiction? Or not? Judging from my searches for available copies of them, we may never know.

GWENDOLINE COURTNEY, A Coronet for Cathie (1950) & other serials (?)

I've nabbed all of Courtney's other titles, but a recent Abe Books search for this one found only a $700 copy of the Girls Gone By reprint. The original edition must be worth its weight in gold. Which (not to be critical of my fellow indie publishers, but…) begs the question of why GGB recently reprinted the readily available Stepmother instead of this one! And along the same lines, when GGB reprinted Mermaid House, a novel that had previously appeared only as a serial, the introductory material suggested that there were other such works to be be published in due course. I might have to drop them a line to see what happened to those.

NETTA SYRETT, A School Year (1902)

Another school story that has apparently become highly collectible. Sims & Clare note that it's on the borderline between children's and adult fiction, which is always tantalizing for me, and that it's based on Syrett's own school experiences. Syrett was also an early feminist who wrote intriguing adult novels, a few of which have been reprinted in recent years. Alas, not a single copy available on Abe Books at last check.

RUTH ADAM, Set to Partners (1947)

Though occasionally an uneven writer, I have always been fascinated by the wonderful detail and social conscience of Adam's novels (and of course her social history A Woman's Place, available from Persephone). I've written about her several times and have been fortunate enough to read several of her obscure titles (see here). But this one remains a complete mystery. Not even any details of its subject matter. Not a single copy available either. Grrrr.

AGNES ROSEMARY COOPER & MARY WELLER (writing as RAMSAY BELL), The Lake of Ghosts (1940)

Very much in the realm of books I'm irrationally obsessed with despite knowing very little about them is this little potential treasure.  Cooper and Weller wrote four novels under their pseudonym, with the first, Dragon Under Ground (1937), described by a contemporary critic as "a pleasantly told yet thrilling tale of Christmas adventure." (That one's currently available for a mere $471!) With the popularity of Christmas titles, and especially if it turns out that these are all mysteries, as seems possible, we just might see that one become available in the future?) But it's Lake of Ghosts that attracts me, despite the fact that my only tidbit of knowledge is that it's set in the Apennines and has an archaeologist as heroine.

JOAN DE FRAINE, Eighty in the Shade (1935)

Along the same lines, I only have a blurb noting that Eighty in the Shade "tells the story of a suburban family over a Bank Holiday weekend." But there's certainly potential there, right?

ALICE LUNT, Tomorrow the Harvest (1955)

Lunt was a close friend of Mabel Esther Allan and the author of several children's titles, including three school stories, as well as this one adult novel, described as being based on her wartime experiences in the Land Army. The children's titles are possible to find, but the novel has practically ceased to exist. You can see though why it would be on this list.

MARGARET LANGMAID, This Charming Property (1934)

The Sydney Morning Herald called this "a spirited little romance" about the "uncivil warfare" aroused in a traditional English village by the building of a row of new villas. "Thus modernity challenged antiquity, and the strife was none the less savage because it took the form of snubs, veiled insults, and occasional outbursts." I'm sold, but alas the book is not—anywhere.

MABEL BARNES-GRUNDY, Paying Pests (1941), Mary Ann and Jane (1944), & The Two Miss Speckles (1946)

These could certainly go either way, and Barnes-Grundy seems to have been known for her frivolous romantic tales (though similar language has been used about some of my favorite authors), but these, her final three novels, are likely enriched by wartime settings. I know little about the first two, but the last deals with two sisters living in Bath during the war.

WINIFRED LEAR, I Like This Place (1980) & Maiden Stakes (1988)

These might be the most hopeless items on this list. Lear, the author of two novels—The Causeway, enthusiastically reviewed here, and Shady Cloister, which I never got round to reviewing and didn't love as much but still enjoyed, as well as the delightful memoir Down the Rabbit Hole—apparently self-published, in small quantities, three short books of anecdotes and recollections, which means they're vanishingly rare. These Peculiar Things, the third title, isn't even listed on Worldcat at all, but I know it exists because it's the one I happened to stumble across (and spent far too much to acquire). I really need to write about it here, but meanwhile I'm beginning to doubt that similar lightning will ever strike for these two.

And if that's not enough hopelessness, there are still some from my previous lists that I despair of ever having the chance to read (perhaps these should be called The Despair List?):

Greyladies happily reprinted MOLLY CLAVERING's Near Neighbours a couple of years back, and Mrs Lorimer's Family is widely available, but all her other novels (see here) seem to be about as rare as a Guttenberg Bible.

My second wish list mentioned BRIDGET LOWRY's To-Morrow's Giants (1933), which remains hopeless to find, but the situation was worsened when Lowry's granddaughter chimed in on the post and quoted a review of another of her novels, The Losers (1932), described as "..a little Cranford about a bungalow town..." There are currently two copies of that one on Abe Books—both selling for well into three figures…

I must keep mentioning F. M. MAYOR's Mrs Hammond's Children (1901) & Miss Browne's Friend (1914) in the hope that some savvy publisher with British Library access will finally reprint them. Her three novels are classics, particularly The Rector's Daughter, so it's criminal that these are still unavailable. Janet Morgan, in her intro to The Squire's Daughter, described Mrs Hammond's Children as a collection of stories “based on the relations among children and the kindnesses and cruelties they practise on one another.” Miss Browne's Friend (1914), published as a serial, is described as "an exploration of a friendship between a suburban lady and a prostitute." One can only imagine what Mayor's brilliance might have made of that!

I was fortunate enough last year to read one of WINIFRED WATSON's rare other novels (aside from the ubiquitous and wonderful Miss Pettigrew)—see here. My focus now is on two more of her books—Hop, Step And Jump (1939), described in one source as a "variant on the Cinderella theme", and Leave and Bequeath (1943), which came after Miss Pettigrew and is described as "part murder-mystery and part psychological study". Both, needless to say, hopeless.

Also on my second list, I mentioned ELEANOR SCOTT's War Among Ladies and Puss in the Corner (1934). There is, it now seems, a glimmer of hope that Interlibrary Loan may come through for War (I'll keep you posted), but Puss seems thoroughly hopeless. A contemporary review of the latter described the author as "a witty and discerning observer of female character, and more especially of the reactions of women to one another." Exactly zero copies available for sale.

Other lingering hopelessness from the earlier lists includes MARJORIE APPLETON's Anything Can Happen (1942), WINIFRED BLAZEY's Grace Before Meat (1942), and MARGARET DALE's Maze (1934).

On the brighter side, however, here are some of the books from the earlier lists for which the fog of hopelessness has cleared:

From my original 2013 list (here), I'm particularly delighted to note that I had a hand in dispelling the fog for two of the titles—both FRANCES FAVIELL's A Chelsea Concerto (1959) and E. NESBIT's The Lark (1922) seemed hopeless to me back then, but are now yours for the ordering as Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press!

My earlier wish lists were rather dominated by WWII novels, and I'm happy to say a number of them have been checked off my list. After several years of searching and savvy shopping, I was thrilled last year to get hold of BARBARA NOBLE's The House Opposite (reviewed here). And then there's the whole slew of other books that have been made available to me by the redoubtable Grant Hurlock, whose library must exceed even my fantasies. Thanks to him I got to read RUTH ADAM's Murder in the Home Guard (reviewed here) and There Needs No Ghost (reviewed here), MARJORIE WILENSKI's Table Two (reviewed here), AND LORNA LEWIS's Tea and Hot Bombs (reviewed here). (Happily, I recently seized a rare opportunity to get hold of Lewis's other wartime girls' novel, Feud in the Factory, and will plan to review it soon.)

Whew! Plus, thanks to Grant, I also now have the one URSULA ORANGE novel I had previously found unattainable, 1942's Have Your Cake, and hope to be reading and reviewing that one soon as well!

NOEL STREATFEILD's World War II era novels for adults were on my list a few years ago. Thereafter, I managed to track down I Ordered a Table for Six, which was rather bleak, and Greyladies reprinted The Winter Is Past (1940), which became one of my favorites (see here). But there's no longer any hopelessness at all, as all of Streatfeild's adult novels are now happily back in print (and in e-book) from Bello Books and Macmillan. Hooray!

Greyladies also cleared the fog of obscurity from RICHMAL CROMPTON's wartime novel, Mrs Frensham Describes a Circle (1942), which I reviewed here. A dozen or so other Crompton titles (sadly not including Mrs Frensham) have also been released in paperback and e-book by Macmillan.

Happily, too, the two unpublished STELLA GIBBONS novels I was yearning for—The Yellow Houses (c1973) and Pure Juliet (c1980, originally An Alpha)—were finally published in recent years, and the latter is a favorite of mine (reviewed here). Not only that, but I've now tracked down all of her other novels, as well as (thanks to Grant Hurlock) her one rare children's title, The Untidy Gnome (see here)!

The wonderful Simon at Stuck in a Book so generously gave me (!!!) his copy of EDITH OLIVIER's The Underground River (1929), which still has pride of place on my shelves.  Why hasn't a children's publisher reprinted this one, especially now that her novels and other books are available from Bello and Macmillan?!  I reviewed it here.

I found several novels by NORAH HOULT and enjoyed them very much. I'm reminded that I really need to get back to reading more of her work. If you're a fan of There Were No Windows, do track down House Under Mars, one of her other wartime works. And I did get hold of ELINOR MORDAUNT's The Family (1915), but it was finally just a bit too bleak for my tastes. It can now be downloaded, at least in the U.S., via Hathi Trust. I nabbed a copy of EDITH PARGETER's Ordinary People (aka People of My Own), quite some time ago, but still haven't read it. It was somewhat deceptively referred to by Janet Maslen as "about a family living in a 'peaceful English setting...in cramped quarters during heavy blitzes".  Actually, it appears to be substantially pre-war in setting, though it may well end with the Blitz, and that caused it to be pushed aside for other priorities. And although I never found SYBIL LETHBRIDGE's The Wild Feather or Gnats and Camels, I did give another of her novels, Misfits, a try, and wrote about it in a post about disappointments here. I might still pick up one or both of the other titles if I stumbled across them, but I'm not actively searching.

Well, surely that's more than enough to have bored you all silly. I doubt that I need to say this at this point, but if you happen to have a copy of any of the above titles, do feel free to drop me a line (furrowed.middlebrow@gmail.com)!

The NEW Hopeless Wish List (now even MORE hopeless!)

I created my original Hopeless Wish List only a few weeks after starting this blog, and I started to talk about creating an updated one within a few months thereafter.  But, alas, apart from going back once or twice to add comments to the original post (with the main effect being that it's now quite sloppy and confusing), I've shamefully neglected the whole idea.  But in the year or so since I first started talking about a new list, I've come across a wide array of tantalizing obscurities, and I've finally decided it's time to share them, albeit in a post that will be sadly lacking in great cover art (if the books just barely exist nowadays, it's not surprising that there are few pictures of their dustjackets).  

Now, bear in mind that in that time my definition of "hopeless" has evolved a little.  Interlibrary loan is a wonderful thing, and on occasion Amazon or Abe Books or Bookfinder can net some remarkable finds at prices cheap enough even for my stingy budget.  Since I drafted the first list, I have actually managed to track down a fair number of titles.  True, a few of those turned out to be disappointments, but also true that a couple have become favorites.  So, the books on this list are mostly even more obscure and hard-to-find than those on my original list.

Here's a brief rundown on some of the books and authors I mentioned in my original list.  First, the positive: 

Thanks to Cornell University's library, I was able to read Frances Faviell's A Chelsea Concerto, now easily one of my handful of absolute favorite books about the home front.  Faviell was featured prominently in Virginia Nicholson's wonderful book Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace 1939-1949 (2011), but still no one seems to be reprinting it.

Then, there was the very, very generous gift of Edith Olivier's one delightful but impossibly obscure children's book, The Underground River, sent to me by Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book.  Edith Nesbit's The Lark came to me on loan from the University of Saskatchewan, which seems to be the only library in North America that still has a circulating copy.   It was only after that that Mary B. noticed that the novel is also available in e-book format as part of Delphi Classics' Complete Novels of E. Nesbit, so that one's not hopeless at all anymore.  And then there's Molly Clavering, whose novels are still vanishingly rare, but happily a cousin of Clavering's generously shared a copy of Near Neighbours with me, which only made me want to read her other work that much more.

As for the less positive outcomes, I tracked down Elinor Mordaunt's 1915 novel The Family, mentioned positively by Nicola Beauman in her wonderful book A Very Great Profession (1983). I completely agree that it's an important and interesting book, and yet ultimately it just proved too bleak and dry for me, and I gave up about three-quarters of the way through.  Interestingly, only a few months after starting my blog, I was thrilled to receive an e-mail from Nicola Beauman herself, who mentioned among other things that she personally didn't feel I should go out of my way looking for Winifred Watson's early novels.  I'd still love to have a look at them, given the opportunity, but if I can't take her word for it that there's not another Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day hiding anywhere among Watson's other works, then who could I believe?! 

Joan Morgan's Ding Dong Dell is certainly still hopeless unless you happen to be sitting in the British Library reading room, but honestly, perhaps it's not quite such a fond wish now, having sampled Morgan's rather disappointing debut novel, Citizen of Westminster…  Also on the down side, I was thrilled to find that the wonderful Boston Athenaeum had several of Noel Streatfeild's more or less forgotten novels for adults…but then I sampled a couple of them and the thrill was gone.  A sort of psychological portrait of a sociopathic child, Luke is told as if it's a murder mystery, though "whodunit" is never really in doubt.  It's ultimately a rather cold-blooded tale, and felt rather empty when all was said and done, but it was at least a somewhat interesting disappointment.  I Ordered a Table for Six, by contrast, for which I had especially yearned due to its wartime setting, was merely tedious and depressing—and harsh, and cynical, and focused, again, on cold, unrelatable characters.  Such an odd combination from the author of so many entertaining and likeable children's books, not to mention the charming froth of her eleven novels under the pseudonym Susan Scarlett.

Some of the other WWII novels I've been yearning for could prove as disappointing as Streatfeild's did, but I'm still desperate for a chance to read Marjorie Wilenski's Table Two, or Richmal Crompton's Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle, or Lorna Lewis' Tea and Hot Bombs, or Barbara Noble's The House Opposite.  Will I ever get to?  Will a trip to the British Library ultimately be necessary in order to do so?

But now, on to the new list:

A few of the titles I'm adding for this second iteration of the list are also books about which I have only the merest snippets of information, so they too could very easily go either way.  Are they charming lost joys?  Or anti-climaxes waiting to happen?  But my instinct (such as it is) seems to be drawing me to them).

The elusive Sybil Lethbridge

I feel like I'm already addicted to Sybil Lethbridge, though I've never managed to read any of her work at all.  Of her 1933 novel, The Wild Feather, the Bookman said: "From Mrs. Campbell Lethbridge we anticipate the more detailed, leisurely methods which is in the worthy tradition of the professional novelist who builds up a theme or plot by refusing to skip the background. Nor are we disappointed. Here is a villain of a builder who seeks to destroy the beauty of an unspoilt seaside place in Cornwall; here is the heroine, fifty-five years of age but still beautiful and admired—a Lady Bountiful, who has in the past outwitted him."  And her intriguingly titled earlier novel Gnats and Camels (1924), reportedly about "a young woman rebelling against her stuffy family," is drawing me to it as well.  But apparently it will have to draw me all the way to the British Library if I want to read it.

The intriguing cover of another Bridget Lowry novel

The Bookman also reviewed BRIDGET LOWRY's To-Morrow's Giants in 1933, and I imagine some of you readers will be as attracted to its description as I am: "The optimism of the book is no flowery sentimental emotion, but the optimism of courage. Katharine Harvey-Adams has lost her only child, her husband is imprisoned for fraud, and she goes into a Suffolk village to start life afresh and to have a home ready for him to come to on his release. The story ends on the eve of his return, and in the interval we have penetrated the lives of the people of the village, rich and poor, and know each one with an intimacy that renders all their small joys and sorrows matters of infinite importance."  But good luck tracking down a copy!

Marjorie Appleton's Anything Can Happen (1942) reportedly deals with a domestic servant conscripted to work in a munitions factory.  Although the Spectator was distinctly luke-warm on it, they added that Appleton "gives vivid and detailed descriptions of what happens in a machine shop and the various rules and regulations governing the production of war material. … The book has many convincing scenes of war-time trials and triumphs."  Add that one to my British Library reading list as well. Perhaps they'll allow me to pitch a tent in the reading room?

A close friend—and roommate for a number of years—of mystery writer Gladys Mitchell, WINIFRED BLAZEY also wrote crime or mystery novels.  Only four of them, apparently, and the early ones sound a bit bleak, from the snippets of information I've found.  But it's the last that I happily would go on a modest quest to acquire.  Grace Before Meat (1942) was described as "a cheerful period piece with a murder thrown in for good measure. … The story is of a young woman who, in the spacious days before the wars, took as her first job the entire charge of a village school. She insisted on living alone, and the various complications which follow have a reasonable inevitability and convincingness."

I know so little about MARGARET DALE's Maze (1934) that nothing at all but blind instinct has led me to list it here, but blind instinct has (sometimes) steered me well in the past, so perhaps it's doing so again?

For a few other books on this list, I have a bit more information to buttress my interest, but of course, they could still fail to live up to their potential.  I can't imagine, however, that ELEANOR SCOTT's War Among Ladies (1928) will be much of a disappointment, particularly after Margin Notes reviewed it a few months ago.  I've become an addict of school stories for adults, and this one sounds particularly intriguing.  Scott's later novel Puss in the Corner (1934), also attracts me, but it seems to be even more steeped in shadow than War is.  There is just a glimmer of hope that Interlibrary Loan could still come through for War.  Fingers crossed!

A terrible picture of one of the novels Kay Carroll
went on to write after Compass Course

Also quite hopeless outside of a national library (for a change of pace, I think I'll read this one at the National Library of Scotland) is KAY CARROLL's Compass Course: The Log of an Air Force Officer's Wife (1941).  An excerpt from the dust jacket tempts me to drop everything and fly to Edinburgh (well, of course, that temptation doesn't require a lot of buttressing): "This is the true story of an Air Force family with its ups and downs and general posts, the period covered being from 1933 to 1941. It is a vastly entertaining story by an Air Officer's wife with a quick and witty mind and a Service heart. The author has the rare knack of turning every incident into an adventure whether it be of the simplest or most exciting nature. It is a moving story which she has to tell, one of high loyalties and magnificent self-sacrifice, and she gives us enthralling glimpses not only of life at air bases in Britain but also of adventures from Cyprus to Baghdad."

New edition of The Good Comrade,
available from Amazon UK

And last but not least of the authors I know a little about (but not much): Scholar Kate Macdonald, author of The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950 (2011), emailed me a while back and provided me with wonderful information about several novels by UNA SILBERRAD.  She's edited Silberrad's early novel The Good Comrade (1907), and she does a podcast series called Why I Really Like This Book, which is irresistible, and which includes a podcast on Silberrad's The Honest Man (1922).  But the novel which intrigued me most from Kate's description was The Letters of Jean Armiter (1923), an epistolary novel about a "useful" middle-aged spinster who writes letters about the trials and travails of family life.  Amazon US doesn't appear to have heard of it, Amazon UK has no copies, and it looks like the British Library or Cambridge for this one. 

Even a year and a half into doing this blog, it's hard for me to believe that there are so many fascinating authors and books that have practically ceased to exist.  

But wait!  There's more!

Perhaps most tantalizing of all the books on this list are those stray, semi-lost books by authors I have read and loved.  For example, I've written several times about URSULA ORANGE, whose handful of novels appeared in the 1930s and 1940s.  She focused often on young, educated, sophisticated women, and the best of the Orange novels I've read is without a doubt Tom Tiddler's Ground (1945, published in the U.S. as Ask Me No Questions).  Her earlier novels are charming and entertaining, and her later novels are a bit darker and distinctly modern in tone.  So it's sheer torture not to be able to read Have Your Cake (1942), published one year after Tom Tiddler's Ground, in the thick of World War II.  Is it another masterpiece of frolic?  Or the beginning of her darker, more psychological explorations?  Or something entirely unique?  Eventually, I will have to find out!

Ruth Adam

I've also read three of RUTH ADAM's books—A Woman's Place, I'm Not Complaining, and A House in the Country—and have enjoyed all of them, as well as being astonished by her range, from very serious, politically-minded fiction, to lighter satire that still has political depth, to wonderful social history (yep, politically-aware as well).  So, I am very curious about There Needs No Ghost (1939), which falls after the seriousness of I'm Not Complaining, but, according to contemporary reviews, is also somewhat humorous in its portrayal of the Bloomsbury elite gearing up for World War II.  The redoubtable Queenie Leavis thought it weaker than Adam's earlier works, but nevertheless concluded her review with praise at the slightly catty expense of a couple of better-known authors: "I for one consider a novel by Mrs. Adam, who has a point of view, a lively feeling for Character as well as for characters, and a personal sense of values, far more worth having than a sackful of art-novels (for instance, those of Miss Elizabeth Bowen and Miss Kay Boyle)."  Oh, dear.  I had a moment of joy when searching Worldcat for it, because it's owned by UCLA's library, to which Andy (bless his heart) has access.  But then I realized that they wisely have it restricted to non-circulating Special Collections, and it's not in a single other U.S. library.  Perhaps a trip to Los Angeles is also in my future?  Of course, I'm also still dreaming of Adam's one mystery novel, Murder in the Home Guard (1942), but the hopelessness surrounding that book remains unabated.

Although I don't hold out particularly high hopes that MARY BELL's Broken Bonds (1946) will be the wonderful stroke of genius that her later novel Summer's Day turned out to be, it would be completely fascinating to read this short romance that appears to be Bell's only other published work.  Are there hints in this early work of the charm, humor, and depth that she would develop so brilliantly a few years later?  Are there any clues in it about the author's still relatively obscure life?  I'd love to know, but the kind of cheaply-published (and perhaps advertiser-supported) romantic fiction that Bonds appears to be was generally viewed as disposable, so finding a copy will likely prove a real challenge.

Among the wonderful information provided to me by MOLLY CLAVERING's cousin Michael Stewart was an amazing list of novels Clavering serialized in the People's Friend magazine from the 1950s to the mid-1970s.  This list totally changed what I thought I knew about Clavering's output and relative prolificity.  But tracking down this work, especially from this side of the pond, is a challenge.  Of course, it's certainly possible that the work Clavering did for serialization would have been of lower quality than her book publications—often the case, due to deadlines and the constraints of periodical publishing.  On the other hand, what if there are lost treasures among those novels???

The redoubtable F. M. MAYOR's two early and now more or less lost writings are surely worthwhile reprints just waiting to happen.  Mrs. Hammond's Children (1901), published under the pseudonym "Mary Strafford" when Mayor was only 29, is described by Janet Morgan in the introduction to the Virago edition of The Squire's Daughter as a collection of stories “based on the relations among children and the kindnesses and cruelties they practise on one another.”  Morgan goes on to mention another work I had never run across: Miss Browne's Friend: A Story of Two Women (1914) is described as "an exploration of a friendship between a suburban lady and a prostitute, published serially in the Free Church Suffrage Times.” Even if the quality of these two early works isn't up to the standards of her later work—such as her masterpiece The Rector's Daughter—they deserve to be in print.  Mayor's literary reputation has been on the rise in later years (Rector's Daughter appeared under the Penguin Modern Classics imprint a few years back), and readers and scholars should have access to her full body of work.  Both of these works would be out of copyright in the U.S. (and presumably in the U.K. as well, since Mayor died in 1932), so hopefully Project Gutenberg or Archive.org will get around to them eventually, but copies are not exactly easy to come by, and both works sound so intriguing that some savvy publisher should get in gear and reprint them.

And finally, with my recent growing obsession with girls' school stories, I might as well mention here how difficult many of those are to come by—at least without indulging in frequent flights to the U.K. or splurging on school stories instead of groceries (always a temptation).  Alas, these are the kinds of books that have almost unanimously been discarded by—or, perhaps more likely, stolen from?—libraries.  In the few cases where libraries still hold these books, they have naturally been placed in non-circulating special collections.  Since few genres seem to attract so many avid collectors, prices for those copies which do get listed for sale are often budget-busting.  And even the existence of the wonderful Girls Gone By Press, furiously reprinting many of the best books of the genre, doesn't always make them accessible for long, since their small print runs ensure that their editions lapse out of print quickly and become almost as collectible (and expensive) as the original versions.

So much hopelessness in one post.  Could anyone possibly have greater woes? 

Obviously, the answer to that question is yes—lots of people, many with much greater woes.  But still, it would be nice to write an update to this post a year from now and report that I've successfully tracked down six or seven of those titles.  Hope does, after all, spring eternal!

The Hopeless Wish List (Updated)

[It was high time I updated this post, and in fact it's high time I do a brand new one, with several newly-discovered but utterly hopeless titles.  In the meantime, I've made some updates below.]

A melancholy list of my most lusted after but elusive titles:

MOLLY CLAVERING

any novel besides Mrs. Lorimer's Family

Molly Clavering, a friend and neighbor of D. E. Stevenson, published at least a dozen novels of her own, but only one, Mrs. Lorimer's Family (1953), seems to have achieved enough popularity (and reprints) to remain available today.  It's charming and funny and deserves to be on the same shelf as Stevenson herself, but sightings of any of Clavering's other novels anywhere outside the British Library are as few and far between as really good Nicole Kidman movies…

FRANCES FAVIELL

A Chelsea Concerto (1959)

[Happily, this one is no longer hopeless, though certainly still difficult to find.  It's worth tracking down though—see my review here.]

Historian Virginia Nicholson's letter to the Telegraph recommending this book as "an unusually well-written and insightful memoir of the London Blitz" moved it right to the top of my "to read" list, but efforts have been hampered by its complete absence from U.S. libraries and the dearth of affordable copies online.  For now, it remains a lovely mirage on the horizon…

RUBY FERGUSON

the early mysteries

[I did buy a copy of the Valancourt reprint of He Arrived at Dusk, and was very pleased with the quality of the reprint. Valancourt does excellent work.  Sadly, though, I couldn't quite engage with the book and have concluded that Ferguson's other mysteries may just not be for me. Perhaps sometimes the hopelessness of a book is more tantalizing than the book itself?]

Admittedly, I've found Ferguson to be uneven in her novels—she wrote two of my all-time favorites, Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary (1937) and Apricot Sky (1952), but also the considerably less exciting Our Dreaming Done (1946), For Every Favour (1956), and The Wakeful Guest (1962).  But I've also read two of the early mysteries she published under the pseudonym R. C. Ashby—Death on Tiptoe (1931), which was (briefly) in print from Greyladies a couple of years ago, and Out Went the Taper (1934), a badly weathered copy of which I stumbled across on Amazon—and they were consistently amusing and interesting.  I'd like to track down The Moorland Man (1926), Beauty Bewitched (1928), Plot Against a Widow (1932), or He Arrived at Dusk (1933), but so far it's an unfulfilled desire.  [Well, perhaps it’s not totally hopeless?  Practically as soon as I wrote this, I noticed on Amazon that a new edition of He Arrived at Dusk has just been published.  The publisher, Valancourt Books, seems to be relatively new and are offering some other interesting titles as well (but alas, very few by women writers).]

STELLA GIBBONS

the unpublished novels

Maybe it's just because they're so hopeless (never published at all does tend to trump out-of-print for sheer obscurity value), or maybe it's because Gibbons has gradually become one of my favorite writers since Vintage started reprinting some of her lesser known works a year or two ago.  Either way, the novels of Gibbons's older years, The Yellow Houses (finished about 1973) and An Alpha (finished about 1980) appear to combine elements of fantasy and spirituality and seem well worthy of publication.

NORAH HOULT

virtually everything except There Were No Windows

Along with Edith Olivier, Norah Hoult is the most completely and unjustly neglected of all the writers I've explored.  Persephone revived her wonderful World War II novel There Were No Windows (1944), but otherwise her novels are more or less totally unavailable for sale in the U.S.  Most of what I've managed to read has been through Interlibrary Loan from one library in Texas that (bless its little heart) has kept several of her titles on the shelf.  Novels like House Under Mars (1946), also set during the war, and A Death Occurred (1954) richly deserve to be in print and to receive critical attention.  Thoughts of what other great novels she may have written that are now virtually nonexistent haunt me in the middle of the night.  (Okay, not really, but it does make me really sad…)



Norah Hoult, whose books have vanished like Amelia Earhart

BETTY MILLER

A Room in Regent's Park (1942)

The Death of the Nightingale (1948)

Two of Miller's works, Farewell Leicester Square (1941), about anti-Semitism in London, and On the Side of the Angels (1945), about gender relations in wartime, have been reprinted—the former by Persephone, the latter by Capuchin (and by Virago in the 1980s)—and both are lovely and well worth reading.  Unfortunately, these two other novels published around the same time have not been so lucky and are out of circulation in U.S. libraries and virtually impossible to find for sale.

ELINOR MORDAUNT

The Family (1915)

[No longer hopeless—for better or worse.  I was able to find a copy via Interlibrary Loan.  But, alas, it did prove a disappointment.  I saw the significance of it in its portrayal of Victorian family life, but I admit I found it just too relentlessly bleak and earnest and moved on to other things...]

Mentioned in by Elaine Showalter in her book A Literature of Their Own in the context of a discussion of Ivy Compton-Burnett, this book has intrigued me ever since.  Alas, it remains scarce, and although many of Mordaunt's books are now available for free on Google Books or Project Gutenberg, this one is not.  They should really get with the program!

JOAN MORGAN

Ding Dong Dell (1943)

None of her novels are very readily available, but this wartime novel that deals with evacuees seems to have vanished from the face of the earth—or at least from U.S. libraries and booksellers. 

E. NESBIT

The Lark (1922)

[This one is still pretty close to hopeless, but I was finally, amazingly, able to snag a copy from a library in Canada, and a review will follow soon!]

Finding E. Nesbit's The Lark is no, er, lark

Most of Nesbit's books are so readily available they practically settle on you like dust wherever you happen to be—especially since most were published before 1923 and are therefore available from Google Books or Project Gutenberg.  So why, why, WHY is the novel that sounds most intriguing completely missing in action?  The Encyclopedia of World Biography describes The Lark as "a realistic depiction of two unmarried women struggling to maintain their financial independence by operating a boarding house."

EDITH OLIVIER

The Underground River (1929)

[No longer hopeless thanks to the kindness of Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book.  See my review here for details.]

As everyone reading this blog must know by now, Olivier is one of my favorite obscure writers, but although I've read virtually every other word she wrote, this children's book published in 1929 is just a ghostly apparition until my resistance to spending $80 for one book gets worn down.  So far that hasn't happened.

EDITH PARGETER

Ordinary People (aka People of My Own)

[No longer hopeless, and, alas, below is not at all an accurate description of the book!  I was able to find a reasonably-priced used copy, though I haven't yet gotten around to reading it, but I did discover that it is set pre-war, NOT during the Blitz.  Apologies for my misleading description below, which was based on a rather poorly-worded blurb in a short bio of Pargeter.  Still hard to believe the book hasn't been reprinted, in light of Pargeter's popularity overall, but it's at least easier to understand why the interest in home front lit hasn't triggered a reprint.]

This one is pretty inexplicable.  How did one Pargeter novel—and one about a family living through the Blitz in a small village, no less—get left off the list of Pargeter works to reprint in the 1980s and 1990s after Brother Cadfael became a sensation?  It's bizarre but true, and copies of both the British and American editions are prohibitively expensive when they're available at all.  Someday…

Virtually every book Edith Pargeter 
wrote is a dime a dozen--except one

NOEL STREATFEILD

the World War II novels

Although her children's fiction has remained perennially popular, and her largely disacknowledged "romance" novels under the pseudonym Susan Scarlett are almost entirely back in print thanks to Greyladies, only one of Streatfeild's non-romance novels for adults has been reprinted in recent years—Saplings (1945), reprinted by Persephone (bless their hearts).  Her other novels, particularly the wartime works The Winter Is Past (1940) and I Ordered a Table for Six (1942), are tantalizing in their apparently total unavailability.

WINIFRED WATSON

the early novels

Another odd oversight.  Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938) is Persephone's top selling reprint and a really wonderful, charming masterpiece of entertainment and inspiration, but her several other novels—Fell Top (1935), Odd Shoes (1936), Upyonder (1938), and Leave and Bequeath (1943)—remain extinct outside the preserves of the British Library.

A whole slew of other promising World War II novels

The proliferation of novels by women writers during World War II, combined with paper shortages and other wartime factors, inevitably resulted in a lot of perfectly fine novels becoming impossibly scarce way before their time.  These include: Hester Chapman's Long Division (1943), mentioned by Barbara Pym in her diaries of the time; The House Opposite (1943) by Barbara Noble, who also wrote the great Persephone find Doreen (1946); Ruth Adam's one and only mystery novel Murder in the Home Guard (1942); Marjorie Wilenski's Table Two (1942), which a contemporary review tells me follows the experiences of a group of elderly women translators in the early days of the Blitz; Tea and Hot Bombs (1943) by Lorna Lewis, also set during the Blitz; and Richmal Crompton's Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle (1942), the plot of which apparently revolves around refugees.  These are all about as rarely spotted as an Abbott's Booby.

Richmal Crompton, author of the elusive Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle