“A novel should reflect its society and its circumstances.”

“The novel, more than a simple harking back to a more luxurious, happy past, is also a bold act of narrative wish fulfillment.”

“Being told the truth made the world seem less and not more real.”

Mackworth mimics Freud’s imposition of narrative onto the fragmented stories his patients told him about their lives.

Poking around in the letters of her subjects gave Hayter “the sensation of being an inquisitive housemaid.”

“Her conversion was absolute.”

“The marvel of Baldwin’s situation is its singularity: she missed the entire world between the wars while life went on.”

“The idyllic does not work—maybe it does in painting, but not in literature.”

A woman war journalist takes to the front lines of World War II.

“There was a touch of solemnity in the way that each took their tiny relic of home . . . cut upon a kitchen table that now lies deserted and alone.”

F. Tennyson Jesse’s ‘A Pin to See the Peepshow’ takes inspiration from a scandalous murder case that gripped the British public in 1922.

With eight of her eleven books now back in print, does Barbara Comyns even qualify as a neglected author anymore?

Lucy Scholes on Cleo Overstreet’s lone novel, ‘The Boar Hog Woman,’ whose admirers included Ishmael Reed, Kate Millett, and Flo Kennedy.

Frances Bellerby remains best known—if remembered at all—for her poetry. Her remarkable stories depict with guile and grace a child’s-eye view of the world.

Carlene Hatcher Polite’s novels paved the way for the likes of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor.

Greene’s account of traveling through the interior of Liberia makes only passing mention of his cousin Barbara, who wrote her own book about the trip.

Mrabet was friends with Paul Bowles—and, it’s assumed, lovers, too—and they were artistic collaborators. But his memoir begins long before they met.

The British actress Irene Handl’s novels contain some of the most appalling, monstrously overprivileged, egomaniacal characters ever created.

There’s no more interesting tale of neglect and rediscovery than that of Bette Howland.

It was the Danish writer Dorthe Nors who first introduced me to the work of her countrywoman, the poet, novelist, and memoirist Tove Ditlevsen.

Thelma Forshaw is perhaps best remembered for her hatchet-job review of Germaine Greer, but her acerbic humor led to an excellent book of stories.

A novel by H. D.’s lover, Bryher, captures the unromantic difficulty of living through war.

This month, Lucy Scholes examines a South African writer whose unconventional work has often been left out of the canon.

This lean, disquieting novel, now out-of-print, is reminiscent of the work of Ann Quin and Anna Kavan’s “Ice.”

Colegate’s trilogy seems to find itself snared in a frustrating loop of rediscovery and neglect.

“Shameless” and “unpublishable,” the publishers called it, when they first saw the manuscript in 1950.

As summed up by the Pulitzer-winning poet Carolyn Kizer, this book was simply “too rich a mix for the time in which it appeared.”

An eerily prescient pandemic novel … and a suggestion on what to read instead.

“All My Cats” starts out as an enchanting account of a cat lover’s feline-filled existence, then transmogrifies into a meditation on love, loss, genocide, and guilt.

When I wrote this column—in what now turns out to have been the week before Mazzetti passed away—I had no idea that I was penning an obituary.

Assia Djebar was one of Algeria’s most celebrated female writers and intellectuals. But her debut, written when she was twenty-one, has fallen by the wayside.

Powell and Pressburger were behind some of the most influential films of the forties and fifties. Then Pressburger went on to write a novel far ahead of its time.

More than any of the contemporary so-called Brexit novels, it’s ‘The Ice Age,’ a book written more than forty years ago, that offers the most haunting portrait of our current era of unrest.

Inez Holden went from London’s high society to becoming one of the most interesting chroniclers of the working poor.

Miriam Tlali's "Muriel at Metropolitan" was heavily censored, then swiftly banned upon its publication. That, alone, should be reason for us to recognize its importance today.

First published under a pseudonym, Rosemary Manning's out-of-print memoir describes her failed suicide attempt as a logical response to the homophobic world of the seventies.

Ludwig Bemelmans is best known today as an illustrator or as the author of the Madeleine books, but his love letter to his best friend Elsie de Wolfe is profoundly charming.

During the late fifties, Penelope Mortimer was famous for being the beautiful, lauded authoress wife of the renowned barrister-cum-writer, John Mortimer.

Originally commissioned as a spoof of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ this visceral, gruesome novel about WWI from the perspective of a woman ambulance driver became a national best seller—and was then forgotten.

“Who will be interested in reading the life of an unfortunate black woman who seemed to be making a mess of her life?” Buchi Emecheta asked herself in the early seventies.

Rose Macaulay was one of the most prolific English writers of the first half of the twentieth century. But only one of her books is still in print in the U.S.