Literary Ladies Guide

South Riding was the last published novel of Winifred Holtby (1898 – 1935), released the year after her untimely death at the age of thirty-six. It remains her best-known work and has been adapted several times for various media.

Winifred Holtby was an accomplished British author, journalist, and activist. According to this site’s biography of Holtby:

She also had a successful career in journalism and wrote the first critical study of Virginia Woolf in English. During her lifetime, her fame derived from her work for prominent newspapers and magazines, including the feminist publication Time and Tide. She wrote about democracy and social welfare, feminism and pacifism, education and responsibility, racism and injustice. Read More→

Prolific American author Vera Caspary’s last published novel, Elizabeth X, was released first in the U.K. in 1978, the year before her autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-ups. It was reissued in the U.S. the following year as The Secret of Elizabeth.

This analysis of Elizabeth X, or The Secret of Elizabeth by Vera Caspary is excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission. Read More→

English author Barbara Pym (1913 – 1980) was often compared to Jane Austen for her comedies of manner; she was called Britain’s “new Jane Austen.” Excellent Women was her second novel, published in England in 1952.

Barbara Pym’s novels explore manners and morals in village life with subtle, understated wit and keen insight into human nature that transcends their local flavor. The nine novels published in her lifetime are considered the Pym canon; there were four others published posthumously.

Many Pym devotees cite Excellent Women as their entry-point to her novels, and for legions of fans, it remains their favorite. Shirley Hazzard wrote of Barbara Pym: Read More→

The River by Rumer Godden, a 1946 novel, is a coming-of-age tale based on the author’s experiences growing up in the colonized Bengal region of India, now part of Bangladesh.

Like so many of Godden’s novels, this one has a cinematic flavor, and indeed, is one of the nine books by this prolific author to be adapted to film. In the late 1940s, Godden collaborated on the script for the film version of The River. It was directed by Jean Renoir and released in 1951.

The well-received film won an international award at the Venice Film Festival that year. It later became a great favorite of Martin Scorsese and later also influenced director Wes Anderson. It’s still considered a classic mid-century film. Read More→

“The trouble with being the author of one of the all-time classics of suspense is that people keep expecting you to be that good again; and I suppose I must regretfully say that Vera Caspary’s The Man Who Loved His Wife is no Laura,” began Anthony Boucher’s February 20, 1966 review in the New York Times.

“But it is an intelligent and largely persuasive novel of a laryngectomy subject with a powerful death wish,” continued Boucher’s review, “ and was it himself or one of his family that fulfilled the desire?

I suspect that Mrs. Caspary has cast as a whodunit a story that could have been more effective without the puzzle element; but it still is well worth one’s attention – especially for her unflagging skill in creating unpleasant people.” Read More→

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900 – 1948) is best known as the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and for being the first true Jazz Age flapper in the 1920s. She was also a talented painter and dancer, as well as a writer in her own right. Here, we’ll explore Save Me the Waltz and other writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, which certainly deserve a fresh look.

Struggling first against the excesses of her own Roaring Twenties lifestyle and then battling mental illness, Zelda never achieved the critical success of her husband nor had the chance to fully develop her skills. According to her daughter Frances (Scottie) Fitzgerald:

“It was my mother’s misfortune to have been born with the ability to write, to dance, and to paint, and then never to have acquired the discipline to make her talent work for, rather than against, her.” Read More→

Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) is a valuable resource on the life and work of the beloved British author from the perspective of the late 19^th century. The following excerpt describes her final days —her illness, the courage she displayed, and her death.

Persuasion, the novel Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) was working on when she took ill, and Northanger Abbey (her first completed novel, still unpublished at the time of her death) were both published six months after her death in 1817.

There has been much speculation on the exact cause of her death, and the nature of her illness; but since no one can go back and prove one theory or another, that’s exactly what they remain — theories. You can explore some of these contemporary conjectures; take them all with a grain of salt: Read More→

My Friend Flicka, the 1941 novel by Mary O’Hara, is this author’s most enduring work. The ranch living and rugged Wyoming landscape of her personal experience inspired the novel.

A classic that’s for “children of all ages,” My Friend Flicka is the story of Ken McLaughlin, a rancher’s son, and his untamed horse.

Ken’s father, a practical Scotsman, had no patience for his son’s dreaminess, so out of place in the harsh realities of the family’s horse-breeding farm. Ken becomes smitten with a wild colt, who he names Flicka, meaning “little filly.” Read More→