Falling foul of fashion

J. B. Priestley described the forgotten interwar novelist Dorothy Whipple as the Jane Austen of the 20th century. Posterity has balked at this assessment — as indeed, within Whipple’s lifetime, did both publishers and readers. Although in 1932 her third novel, Greenbanks, topped the bestseller lists in the Observer and the Sunday Times, by the Fifties Whipple had fallen sufficiently foul of fashion to take an enforced extended break from writing, only later to be resumed with a series of low-key children’s books. Hers is a Barbara Pym story without the happy ending in the form of late-in-life rediscovery. Whipple’s re-emergence had to wait for the reissue of her final novel, Someone at a Distance, by Persephone in 1999, 33 years after her death. Persephone, publishers of The Closed Door, continues to champion her cause: once again, Dorothy Whipple has a following.