The Pink House by Nelia Gardner White is a 1950 novel that has the feel of a timeless classic. Yet like the rest of Gardner’s large body of work, it fell out of print and remained obscure and hard to find.

That is, until recently, when Independent press Quite Literally Books reissued it in a handsome new edition in 2025.

It’s surprising that a writer of her caliber would be so thoroughly forgotten. Her books were well reviewed and sold well. She was even a pioneer in the realm of what we now call biofiction: Daughter of Time (1942) is a novelization of the tragically brief and brilliant life of short story master Katherine Mansfield. It was warmly reviewed in the New York Times. Read More→

A few months ago, I was helping pack up my father’s house because, at age ninety-two, he was moving to a retirement home. He had always been a great reader and bibliophile, so we had to go through his library and decide what we would keep and what we would give away. I stumbled on an old paperback of Rosemunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, which must have belonged to Dad’s late girlfriend. 

Published in 1987, The Shell Seekers was an international bestseller. I hadn’t read it in decades and had forgotten what a jewel of a book it was – a 500-page tome of a family saga. Rereading it around a recent Christmastime, I couldn’t wait to go upstairs in the evening and delve back into its pages  despite being surrounded by family and friends,   

The Shell Seekers has beautiful descriptions and many memorable characters. The story reflects the tapestry of life — good times and bad, heartbreak, and passion. Read More→

Despite its provocative title, the heroine of the forgotten bestselling 1928 novel, Bad Girl by Viña Delmar, wasn’t at all as naughty as the pulp cover or film poster would suggest.

In the 1920s, urban American women experimented with sexual freedom more openly than ever. Popular novels by writers — male and female — held up a mirror to the times.

Dorothy, or “Dot,” as she’s familiarly called, succumbs to one instance of premarital sex and quickly marries Eddie (who’s not a bad sort, but not the sharpest tool in the shed) after he offers to make her “respectable.” Read More→

Ramie Targoff begins Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance (Knopf, 2024), her fascinating exploration of four female writers of the English Renaissance, not with a reference to a 16th-century woman, but to Virginia Woolf.

The title of Targoff’s book comes from Woolf’s assertion that if Shakespeare had had a sister, whom she names Judith Shakespeare, who shared his talent for writing, she never would have been able to achieve anything like her brother’s success, given the oppressive conditions women faced in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.

In fact, Woolf claims, she would have “gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at … so thwarted and hindered by other people … she must have lost her health and sanity.” Read More→