Colin Haycraft

After BB 's affair with Clive de Pass ended, she allowed herself to become emotionally entangled with Colin Haycraft , her publisher at Duckworth. This love-affair ran concurrently with her professional relationships with both...

BB re-met Anna Haycraft by chance (some of their children were friends). Colin Haycraft was reputedly a misogynist who believed that non-fiction should be written by men and fiction by women, and on one occasion...

The married couple Colin Haycraft and Alice Thomas Ellis (herself a writer) both worked at Gerald Duckworth publishers, and met BB while she was working there as a clerk. They taught her to write properly...

In Watson's Apology, published in November 1984, BB based a historical novel on actual documents dating from December 1844 to 1884, about events which took place at Stockwell in Surrey. Reciprocal hatred and...

Critics found this novel hard to handle; many were impressed by its undeniable brilliance, while puzzled as to its aims and methods. Oddly, a number of them stated that the story is told from the...

BB was by now a highly marketable commodity as novelists go. Her recent three-book publishing agreement brought her £78,000 up front—almost certainly less than she could have got by bargaining, and even called by...

BB began working as a part-time clerk for the publishing firm Gerald Duckworth , where Colin Haycraft and his wife Anna (the writer Alice Thomas Ellis ) provided invaluable advice for her writing career.

With her publishers, Duckworth , in financial difficulties in 1989, exacerbated by embarking on misconceived and expensive publicity schemes, BB often acted as go-between for Colin Haycraft and his potential, competing backers Roger Shashoua and...

This was the first book she had published since the death of Colin Haycraft and after a determined attempt had been made to lure her away from Duckworth to Viking. The final offer made...

This was her last book to be published by Duckworth , so it must have been after this that she felt Duckworth were trying to drop her. Proudly, she dropped them first, and rejected overtures...

Hodder and Stoughton turned it down, then Chapman and Hall , then Chatto and Windus , all with words of encouragement which BB felt too insecure to take in. These were later joined by Weidenfeld and Nicolson

The front featured a photographed, fictional picture of the bottling plant with figures including BB and a disguised Colin Haycraft .

BB commemorated Colin Haycraft in an essay titled Mr Chips in a book of tributes to him, Colin Haycraft: Maverick Publisher, 1995. On 15 October 2005 she contributed to The Guardian a moving...