SCOTT, Eleanor.

£200 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

War Among Ladies. First US edition, first printing, published in the same year as the UK edition. Scott's first novel under the pen name is a "quietly devastating novel about the realities of life for single working women in the 1920s and the systems that failed them" (Thomas). Scott's works are now notably uncommon. Eleanor Scott (1892-1965) was born Helen Madeline Leys and published under the pennames of Scott and Peter Redcliffe Shore. Described by respected supernatural fiction editor Richard Dalby as "one of the best, but ultimately least known, writers" of this era, she is best known now for her acclaimed 1929 collection of ghost stories Randall's Round (Dalby, p. 169). Educated at Somerville College, Oxford, Scott went on to teach locally and wrote several works detailing the day-to-day lives of women. War Among Ladies draws on her own experiences and tells the trials of the teachers at Besley High School for Girls, including those of Miss Cullen, who was also educated at Somerville. Scott's "shrewd and uncanny" grasp of the emotional lives of women led to her description in contemporary reviews "as an understanding writer of the feminine psychology" (The Denton Lass O, 9 October 1930). Alongside her fictional works, Scott published popular histories of notable women, contemporarily considered "her greatest successes with the public" (Aigner, p. 341).

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