Nicola Beauman Knihy

The goal of the provincial lady is to maintain 'niceness', whether it be in the home, relationships or personal behaviour. 'The Diary of a Provincial Lady' first published in the 1930s is a witty celebration of the suburban British housewife. in wartime.

A very great profession, first published in 1983, looks at women like Katherine in Virginia Woolf's Night and Day ('Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition... She lived at home') and Laura, the heroine of Brief Encounter, women whose lives and habits were wonderfully recorded in the fiction of the time. Drawing on the novels to illuminate themes such as domestic life, romantic love, sex, psychoanalysis, the Great War and 'surplus' women, A Very Great Profession uses the work of numerous women writers to present a portrait, through their fiction, of middle-class Englishwomen in the period between the wars.

This is the first biography of one of the greatest English writers of the last century. Betty Coles became Elizabeth Taylor upon her marriage in 1936. Her first novel At Mrs. Lippincote's appeared in the same year (1945) as the actress Elizabeth Taylor was appearing in National Velvet. Over the next thirty years, "the other Elizabeth Taylor" lived and worked in Buckinghamshire and published several titles of fiction. Nicola Beauman's biography draws on a wealth of hitherto undiscovered material.Nicola Beauman is the author of A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914–39, Cynthia Asquith, and Morgan: a Life of EM Forster. She founded Persephone Books in 1999.