Book Society

The novel was a Book Society choice, and received accolades from reviewers for its brilliantly successful attack on . . . the spiritual and physical relationship of married life.John Betjeman called it...

The reviewer in British Book News wrote: This admirable volume forms a valuable complement to [Smyth's] own autobiographical works, which are minor masterpieces of English prose. The biography became a Book Society book...

Recommended by the Book Society and the Book Guild , The Southern Gates of Arabia also received high praise in the Daily Telegraph, among other papers. FS , rather surprisingly, was compared to Jane Austen

Diary of a Provincial Lady received positive reviews, though some critics also drew attention to its limitations. Henry Seidel Canby praised EMD in The Saturday Review of Literature as one of the really skilful novelists...

This novel was chosen a Book Society recommendation (of which between six and ten were selected per month); it was not the choice of the month, since the panel felt it was too morbid—deeply...

This time The Spectator, pursuing the line of excessive modernist influence, called EHY a thicker-skinned Virginia Woolf . . . but hardly less bogged in the undifferentiated welter of phenomenal experience. This novel...

Woolf reported reading the novel all in a gulp with pleasure in bed; very well done I think. It was a Book Society Choice, recommended by Clemence Dane and Hugh Walpole , and...

The sales of this second novel nearly doubled those of Pym's first: Excellent Women sold 5,477 copies in the two months to June 1952, while Some Tame Gazelle sold only 3,722 in the thirteen years...

Reviews were highly positive. The Sunday Times said that PFuses a large canvas with great deftness, and her dialogue is a joy.John o'London's mentioned her near-genius for story-telling, and the Observer...

RG herself had misgivings about Gypsy, Gypsy, but her publisher Peter Llewelyn Davies wrote of being enchanted by the story.Spencer Curtis Brown pointed out that it owed a debt to D. H. Lawrence

A reader at Curtis Brown praised DW 's very shrewd and natural gift of depicting her middle-class characters, while Lord Gorell at John Murray wrote: Much her best work and the former was good.

South Riding was enormously successful. It was chosen by the Book Society as their Book of the Month for March, and sold 25,000 copies within the first three weeks of its publication. In 1937 it...

Colonel and Mrs Williams , the owners of Parciau, were far from pleased at finding themselves and their lives portrayed in fiction. The novel, however, was again a Book Society Choice. It was...

The Hidden River had some bad reviews in influential places, but excellent sales. It was a Book Society choice, earning £2,500 in English royalties, £268 from Book-of-the-Month Club in Canada, and a dollar amount...

They Were Sisters too became a Book Society Choice. Sales before publication day passed 32,000, and the editor of Woman's Magazine said it was of course a masterpiece.DW was offered by Gaumont-British