Last month I described how a number of enterprising publishers are seeking to make a few honest pounds by reprinting some well-made crime and thriller books from the post-war period: books which had gone out of print and might well have disappeared altogether but for a few publishing folk with long memories and an eye for an opportunity.
If that was what was happening in the field of crime, mysteries and thrillers, I thought to myself, then perhaps something similar was happening to that class of commercial fiction which is aimed directly at the female half of the population. Not pure romance perhaps, but family sagas and the like. Some publishers still label this genre women’s fiction, which I hope won’t offend anyone. So, I sat here scratching my head and asking myself who were the women writers whose books were being widely read, mainly by women readers, back in the 1940s and ’50s. And I came up with a couple of names straightaway: Angela Thirkell and Mazo de la Roche.