First up - I love visiting the British Library. OK I freely admit I am not madly keen on its architecture. I lived in Judd Street just opposite for years and watched it slowly being built and I do mean slowly. My sister, a librarian, worked for the British Library in Store Street and was really looking forward to moving into the new building. Sadly, it took so long that she was retired by the time it was open.
When she was working for the BL she had a pass to the British Museum and one glorious day I explored the stacks behind the Reading Room and it was wonderful. All those books and along winding iron stairways and galleries. My joy was unconfined when I discovered all the Famous Five books by Enid Blyton!
Then a year or so ago I was able to return the favour and took my sister to the British Library in the Euston Road as those lovely peeps there had arranged a tour around the stacks and when I tell you we saw the Guttenburg bible and scores by Mozart and Shakespeare's first folio I am sure you can imagine my feelings. Tears were not far away.
Then they have a wonderful bookshop and in that bookshop are packed those wonderful British Library Crime Club series which I have written about so many times on Random. Freeman Wills Croft, George Bellairs, E C R Lorac, John Dickson Carr, Alan Melville - an endless list of long forgotten Golden Age authors now available again. I was delighted when one of the titles I suggested was reprinted.
And NOW if that was not enough the British Library is releasing a series of out-of-print books by largely forgotten female writers this spring to coincide with the forthcoming exhibition “Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights”.
Starting with four books from the 1910s, 20s, 30s and 40s, the Women Writers series focuses on authors who enjoyed broad, popular appeal in their day. Each work sees fictional heroines challenge the attitudes of their time and highlight women’s experience inside and outside the home.
It begins with The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair, a suffragist and British novelist who was dubbed "the readable modernist". Her 1917 book follows the fortunes of the Harrison family as the children grow up in the shadow of the First World War and Dorothy’s brothers go off, one by one, to the trenches, while she becomes involved with the suffrage movement.
When I read this I had to laugh as I had just read a post about this author on the Anne Bronte blog where Nick Holland who runs it had written about May Sinclair. Here is the link to this post as it is well worth reading http://www.annebronte.org/2020/03/08/iwd-may-sinclair-and-the-three-brontes/. Then to cap this I popped into the Oxfam Book shop this morning while I was in town and found a copy of The Three Brontes, a biography by, yes, one May Sinclair. It is weird how this kind of things happens.
Bad Girl by American short story author and Hollywood screenwriter Viña Delmar follows. Published in 1928, Bad Girl was a bestseller in its day as a cautionary tale about attitudes to premarital sex, pregnancy and childbirth in 1920s Harlem. I know nothing about this author at all - I freely admit this and so looking forward to finding out more.
Third in the series is 1931’s My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes. Set in 1930s London, literary Nevis Falconer struggles to be a writer and also manage her marriage with increasing independence outside the home.
Now this writer I do know. One Fine Day is one of the most elegiac beautifully written novels I have every read. Just after the end of WW2 and I have my beloved Virago green covered edition with which I will never part. "First published in 1946 this subtle, finely wrought novel presents a memorable portrait of the aftermath of war, its effect upon a marraige and a family, charting, too, a gradual but significant change in the nature of English middle class life". It is wonderful. Persephone books have also published others by this author but My Husband Simon is totally new to me and I cannot wait to get my greedy little mitts on it,
The fourth title is Chatterton Square, a 1947 novel by James Tait Black Memorial Prize-winner and William author E H Young. The book concerns the complex web of relationships between two neighbouring families, the Blacketts and the Frasers. Framed by the advance of the Second World War, the mechanics of marriage and love are laid bare through the observation of three of the marital options open to the mid-century woman: unmarried, separated, miserably married.
Now another writer I love. I have Chatterton Square, again in the Virago green edition and also others by E H Young. I read Miss Mole a few years ago and loved it and here is a link to my review.
The series launches in the spring with a further four titles to be released in the autumn and I am simply delighted to see that among these is a title by Elizabeth von Arnim "Father" . I discovered EVA about twenty years ago when I came across An Enchanted April (again a Virago copy) and embarked on tracking down as many of her others as I could.
These books are being published ahead of a new British Library exhibition "What a magnificent way to mark the British Library’s forthcoming, hotly anticipated women’s rights show ‘Unfinished Business’. These books have been sourced from the library’s collections and, while not about women’s rights as such, the first four titles have a modern, forward-looking focus and provide a freshness of insight into women’s lives and the richness and excellence of their writing."
So there you have it - a myriad reasons for loving and visiting the British Library. I am lucky enough to be sent review copies of many of their books and this is a privilege and a delight and one which I never take for granted.
Lots to look forward to.
