Marghanita Laski Books In Order

Little Boy Lost

‘When I picked up this 1949 reprint I offered it the tenderly indulgent regard I would any period piece. As it turned out, the book survives perfectly well on its own merit although it nearly finished me. If you like a novel that expertly puts you through the wringer, this is the one.’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Hilary Wainwright, an English soldier, returns to a blasted and impoverished France during World War Two in order to trace a child lost five years before. But is this small, quiet boy in a grim orphanage really his son? And what if he is not? In this exquisitely crafted novel, we follow Hilary’s struggle to love in the midst of a devastating war.

Facing him was a thin little boy in a black sateen overall. Its sleeves were too short and from them dangled red swollen hands too big for the frail wrists. Hilary looked from these painful hands to the little boy’s long thin grubby legs, to the crude coarse socks falling over shabby black boots that were surely several sizes too large. It’s a foreign child, he thought numbly…

Marghanita Laski was born in 1915 to a family of Jewish intellectuals in Manchester; Harold Laski, the socialist thinker, was her uncle. She was the author of six novels and a celebrated critic. She died in 1988.

The Victorian Chaise Longue

This ‘slim, brilliant, very scary novel’ John Sandoe Books came out in 1953, four years after ‘Little Boy Lost’. It is about a young married woman who lies down on a chaise longue and wakes to find herself imprisoned in the body of her alter ego ninety years before. It impressed PD James, author of the ‘Preface’, ‘as one of the most skillfully told and terrifying short novels of its decade.’And Penelope Lively described it as ‘disturbing and compulsive’, commenting: ‘This is time travel fiction, but with a difference…
instead of making it into a form of adventure, what Marghanita Laski has done is to propose that such an experience would be the ultimate terror…
so Melanie/Milly clings to the belief that she is dreaming for as long as she possibly can; the point at which she is forced to abandon this comfort and search for other explanations is her plunge into nightmare. ‘In the stifling, menacing atmosphere in which Melanie finds herself there is another dark, unspoken theme. Sex. Milly has been in some way disgraced…
Once again the chaise longue is the hinge between the two planes of existence. The site of rapture, of ecstasy that is the implication…
‘

To Bed with Grand Music

This 1946 novel, originally published under a pseudonym, is about sex in wartime. At the beginning, Deborah and her husband are in bed, saying goodbye to each other before he is posted overseas. They swear eternal loyalty. But Deborah is very soon bored by her life in the country with her young son and gets a job in London. She then acquires a lover, and when he is posted overseas another, and another This is the fourth novel by Marghanita Laski to be published by Persephone Books. Juliet Gardiner writes in her Preface: ‘The fascination of To Bed with Grand Music is its unusual recreation of one aspect of the Home Front in the Second World War. It is an exaggerated, near harlot’s tale without doubt, but it has a wry authenticity and provides a refreshing counterpoint to all the usual wartime novels of sterling women making do and mending. The book’s appeal lies in its portrayal of someone who signally failed the test of warA’, and in its evocation of a fractured and transient society during the exigencies and contingencies of wartime.’

Common Ground

This anthology concentrates all Marghanita Laski’s concerns and commitments, expressed during her years as Assistant Chairman of the Arts Council: that all the arts, but especially poetry, should be accessible. Arranged thematically, this collection includes some of the best loved and most durable verse, including comic poems, satires and celebrations. It is intended for new readers of poetry and for those who want a catholic refresher.

God and Man

A penetrating discussion between & 34The Atheist and the Archbishop’ Anthony Bloom& 39s famous television discussion with Marghanita Laski on the essence of Christian faith and life opens this book of five selections. Summarizing the Christian life in terms of worship, joy, and the challenge to grow into a full stature, Metropolitan Anthony calls for a worshipful attitude to life. In other essays on & 34Doubt and the Christian Life,’ & 34Man and God,’ and & 34Holiness and Prayer,’ he seeks to reveal the true nature of man by looking to Christ, the true man and true God. Man, he states, becomes truly human only when he is united with God, infinitely, deeply, inseparably, so that the fullness of God abides in the flesh. Thus, in terms of holiness, all holiness is God& 39s holiness in us; it is the expression of love the response of the love given by God to His Church.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen sprang from the upper middle class society of late eighteenth century southern England. Orthodox in morals and religion, generally Tory in politics this was the milieu that she describes so memorably in her novels. Indeed her environment provided her with material ideally suited to her talents: accurate observation of character, wit, dramatic intuition, an ear for realistic dialogue, and a highly disciplined formal sense. These gifts, evident in the early and satirical novels Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, found their perfect expression in the great books of her maturity, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. The late novelist and critic Marghanita Laski brings to this illustrated biography the fruits of a long and loving study of Jane Austen, her work, her letters, and her time.