Virago Press Limited

1 'No point being eighty, is there?' said Liza. 'If you can't be a bit outrageous?' And certainly she looked it, Stephen thought, with her scarlet headsquare tilted crazily over one eye, giving her the look of a senile pirate. 'I'm sorry I didn't let you in when you come before. Thought you...

PrologueBefore you hear about it at Florian, let me tell you what happened next.It was night, and noiseless except for the waves, the brusio of the mosquitoes and brulichio of the water rats and the secret corpses shifting gently in the dark silt of the Grand Canal.I was cleaning the squirrel-fur...

INTRODUCTION INTO THE LIGHT This book is a celebration of the female body — its anatomy, its chemistry, its evolution, and its laughter. It is a personal book, my attempt to find a way to think about the biology of being female without falling into the sludge of biological determinism. It is...

INTRODUCTION Winifred Holtby began writing Mandoa, Mandoa! towards the end of 1931 during the aftermath of the October General Election. It was a time of national disillusionment; a succession of economic disasters and rising unemployment had forced the collapse of the Labour Government, and its...

CO Eugene woke in a paper hat and went to the window where it was snowing. Snow was falling on the rabbit hutch and on the thin cat, on the broken saucer and on the abandoned tricycle. A bottle he had brought from the party lay broken, half- filled with snow. Still in pyjamas, he went down...

Susan Spray is a remarkable novel by a writer who deserves resurrection: Sheila Kaye-Smith, once celebrated as the "Sussex novelist", and now almost forgotten. Her novels have two major narrative virtues: they go with a "passionate swing" (her own phrase), and they combine a strong sense of...

Born of Yorkshire parents in Lancashire in 1897, Lettice Cooper has had a writing career that has confidently spanned more than sixty years. What at once emerges from any retrospect not merely of her novels but of her two detective stories, her biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson and...