the best of books and company ed. susan hill

Times Literary Supplement 11 february 2011

Books and Company, the literary magazine started by the novelist Susan Hill, ran from 1997 to 2001. Hill has said of running it “never again”, but she is rightly proud of this collection of articles, proud enough to publish them under her own imprint, Long Barn Books. “Books are company”, as Inga-Stina Ewbank says in the final article here, and this is the case for all the writers represented.

Many of the articles hark back to childhood when, as Juliet Nicholson says, “books were my real world”. The intense experience of reading is also captured in John Francis’s description of reading a short story by M. R. James: “I was the bell. I was, for a giddy moment, the pines, before mutating into the mountain stream”. In “Learning to read, Yorkshire 1928”, Kit Pyman describes the equally vivid experience of  being unable to read a signpost for somewhere called Gypsy Lane: ‘I was overwhelmed by a deep sense of injustice at this phonetic treachery and collapsed with my face pressed to the sign like a tragic heroine.’  There are other, less autobiographical gems to be unearthed here, such as those to be found in Margaret de Fonblanque’s fascinating article Rooms of their own where she looks at the living circumstance of independent female writers in the 1920s, at the time Virginia Woolf wrote her essay.  Dorothy Sayers is quoted as saying of Lord Peter Wimsey, ‘When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet.’

In spite of all this excitement, the tone of the collection is parochial.  We are a million miles away from a literary magazine such as Granta, whose latest edition is devoted to young Spanish-Language novelists.  The pages of Books and Company celebrate Noddy, Inspector Morse and, as if to ram the point home, a wartime book called England is a Village. This is not necessarily a bad thing however, and in Our writers, Ronald Blythe makes an eloquent argument for treasuring those writers who are ‘local’ to us. 

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement