Stevie Smith – författare

INTRODUCED BY RACHEL COOKE''Virginia Woolf''s roving consciousness lies behind the prose in Novel on Yellow Paper, but the tone owes more to Dorothy Parker . . . When first published in 1936, it overnight turned Smith into a celebrity . . . the subversiveness of this novel has never lost its appeal, its greatness lying in its exuberant celebration of the uncircumscribed spirit'' - Frances Spalding, IndependentStevie''s alter ego Pompey is young, in love and working as a secretary for the magnificent Sir Phoebus Ullwater. In between making coffee and typing letters for Sir Phoebus, Pompey scribbles down - on yellow office paper - her quirky thoughts. Her flights of imagination take in Euripedes, sex education, Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, shattering conventions in their wake.

It is 1936. Pompey Casmilus (the heroine of Smith''s debut, Novel on Yellow Paper) lives in London with her beloved Aunt, bothered by the menace of German militarism, bothered too by the humbug which confronts it, bothered most of all by her hopeless love affair with Freddy. Its ending plunges Pompey into melancholy; six months of rest and recuperation are prescribed and Pompey goes to Schloss Tilssen on the northern German border, only to fall in with a strange band of conspirators: the plum-coloured Mrs Pouncer, the absent-minded Colonel Peck and the dashing Major Tom Satterthwaite, whom Pompey comes to love.How Pompey gets into uniform and becomes a spy is only one of the astounding events in this extraordinary novel which, on a serious level, is also about a powerful investigation of power and cruelty in a world preparing for war.