Gertrude Trevelyan – författare

‘A 20th century literary classic!’ This was best-selling novelist Rachel Hore’s reaction when asked to introduce Gertrude Trevelyan’s 1937 novel Two Thousand Million Man-Power. Utterly forgotten for over 80 years, neither the book nor its author are mentioned in any history of 20th century English literature. Yet Trevelyan is arguably the finest novelist of the generation to follow Virginia Woolf and Two Thousand Million Man-Power is among her greatest achievements. It is a masterly piece of social realism that traces the lives of a young London couple set against a background of rapid technological, ideological and political change, and satirizes contemporary bourgeois life and its fashionable interwar belief in endless progress.Beginning on New Year’s Eve, 1919, Two Thousand Million Man-Power follows Katherine and Robert, as university graduates, through almost 20 years of British history. Starting as idealistic radicals, they become comfortable middle-class consumers, only to then be plunged into unemployment and poverty when the stock market crashes. Trevelyan’s portrait of life in the 1920s and 1930s is as fierce and gripping as George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Two Thousand Million Man-Power continues the mission of Recovered Books series to rescue exceptional books long unavailable to today’s readers.

When Jane marries the elderly grocer William Chirp, she thinks she has moved up into the comfort of middle class. Instead, she discovers that William exerts a control over her life that forces her to live like a prisoner. His tight fistedness and suspicions so affect Jane that even after his death, she finds herself trapped in a penny pinching paranoia and resorts to scavenging for food out of garbage bins and taking her silverware with her everywhere in a shopping bag. Utterly forgotten for over 80 years, neither the book nor its author are mentioned in any history of 20 th century English literature. Yet Trevelyan is arguably the finest novelist of the generation to follow Virginia Woolf and William’s Wife is one of the most powerful psychological portraits in all fiction.As a story about a woman at the mercy of a domineering and abusive husband, William’s Wife is a novel still resonant and relevant in today’s world. Even more, it’s one of the most effective accounts of the onset and experience of mental illness, of a paranoia and miserliness that gradually takes over Jane Chirp’s life and leads her to move to ever more cramped and dingy flats where she surrounds herself with her belongings like a besieged hermit.

One of the most audacious of all modernist novels. Millicent, Lady Cheseborough -- fifty, widowed, rejected by her much younger lover -- lies dying in a nursing home, the victim of a stroke. As she nears death, her thoughts go back through her life in a desperate attempt to find its meaning.With great stylistic daring, Gertrude Trevelyan recreates the stream of consciousness in its most realistic and moving form. As It Was in the Beginning is perhaps Trevelyan's most important work, a novel that belongs with To the Lighthouse or As I Lay Dying.