Description

Published 2006: First Edition / Softcover / Excellent Condition

Original stiff card covers with white titles on the cover and spine and original similar dust jacket. 148 as new very clean and bright pages. Slight shelf wear on dust jacket. (HQ576)

Postage €4.00.
An Post prepaid postage envelopes within the Republic of Ireland, with no weight restrictions from €6.95.

A selection of Diana Gardner's 1940s short stories. The fifteen stories are very different from one another, but they share a characteristically sharp, sardonic quality

There are 15 stories in this collection, all extremely varied but all sharing a sharp, sardonic quality characteristic of Diana Gardner’s work. Several of the stories in 'The Woman Novelist' are about women behaving badly, and many of them are uncomfortable reading.

Diana Gardner (1913–1997) was a writer, wood engraver and book illustrator who studied at the Westminster School of Art.
Diana Gardner, born in 1913, went to Bedford High School and Westminster School of Art and afterwards worked as a wood engraver and book illustrator. During the Second World War she lived with her father in a cottage in Rodmell in Sussex, where she knew the Woolfs and often visited Leonard after Virginia's death. She had begun writing when very young, her first short story being published in Horizon in 1940. Her collection Halfway Down the Cliff (from which all but one of the stories in The Woman Novelist and Other Stories are selected) was published in 1946. After the war Diana Gardner returned to London and worked in publishing as a reader and editor. Her novel The Indian Woman appeared in 1954. From the 1960s onwards she was a full-time painter working mostly in pen-and-ink and watercolour: her work was frequently exhibited until the time of her death in 1997.

Reviews:

I really loved this – great compelling stories, full of fascinating characters and interesting insight. I can't wait to read more by this author!

Diana Gardner was a writer and artist who knew Virginia and Leonard Woolf; they were neighbours during the war. Whether Virginia Woolf ever actually read Diana’s work seems to be unknown – though she is reported to have scribbled a congratulatory note on the side of the Horizon pre-publication leaflet, which announced Diana Gardner’s story ‘The Land Girl’ would be included in the Christmas 1940 edition. The Land Girl is for me one of the best stories in this really quite superb collection. Gardner’s depiction of jealous selfishness and its destructive nature is breath-taking. The narrator Una, is a cool, heartless creature, who comes we find out early on from a fairly well-to-do family – she is initially enraged by the lack of sugar for her porridge. From then on the girl wages her own little war on the woman whose home she is staying in.

“It was then that something took possession of me. The sight of the old, chipped thermos on the orange tray and his spent, thin shoulders bent over it caused my dislike of Mrs Farrant to well up into a sudden storm of hatred.”

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2728106-the-woman-novelist-and-other-stories