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The Sidmouth Letters

On sale

1st January 1988

Price: £10.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349114088

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Jane Austen’s love life- long the subject of speculation- is finally, delightfully dealt with in the title story of this collection. Many of the other stories, like ‘The Sidmouth Letters,’ bring together past and present- with sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing, often intensely moving results.

With quiet elegance and devastating accuracy, Jane Gardam probes many and varied lives. We meet a trio of Kensington widows, mean-spirited and middle-aged, paying improbable tribute to a long exploited nanny; we await- with dread- a stranger to tea in an Engliish home; we witness the mercurial changes that take place in young love, and we watch as a bohemian, passionate past returns to tempt domestic bliss.

Reviews

THE TIMES
Brilliantly observed... moving.
DAILY TELEGRAPH
The economical exactitude of her observation makes each of these eleven stories a keen pleasure.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Observer
She does fiction as it should be done, with confidence and insight
GUARDIAN
A fresh and huge delight... deliciously barbed.
EVENING STANDARD
... combines an extraordinary vivid imagination with a felicity of expression, a hugely developed sense of the absurd, and the ability to involve a reader's emotions with her characters in a few pages.