Ballad of Favour

DICKENS, Monica

Overton, Glynis

Literature & Fiction

HarperCollins, Publishers

Cry of a seagull

Collins

The Messenger (Armada)

Cry of a Seagull (The Messenger Series)

'Life was a wordless battle of wits between us, with her keeping a sharp look-out for signs of neglect, and me trying to disguise my slovenliness by subterfuge. I became an adept at sweeping dust under the bed, and always used the same few pieces of silver'. Unimpressed by the world of debutante balls, Monica Dickens shocked her family by getting a job. With no experience whatsoever, she gained employment as a cook-general. Monica's cooking and cleaning skills left much to be desired, and her first few positions were short lived, but soon she started to hold her own. Monica discovered the pleasure of daily banter with the milkman and grocer's boy and the joy of doing an honest day's work, all the while keeping a wry eye on the childish pique of her employers. "One Pair of Hands" is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining insight into world's both upstairs and down in the early 1930s.

One Pair of Hands: Upstairs and Downstairs, Seen Through the Eyes of an Ex-Debutante Turned Cook

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Ebury Press

Monica Dickens's first book, published in 1940, could easily have been called Mariana - an Englishwoman. For that is what it is: the story of a young English girl's growth towards maturity in the 1930s. We see Mary at school in Kensington and on holiday in Somerset; her attempt at drama school; her year in Paris learning dressmaking and getting engaged to the wrong man; her time as a secretary and companion; and her romance with Sam. We chose this book because we wanted to publish a novel like Dusty Answer, I Capture the Castle or The Pursuit of Love, about a girl encountering life and love, which is also funny, readable and perceptive; it is a 'hot-water bottle' novel, one to curl up with on the sofa on a wet Sunday afternoon. But it is more than this. As Harriet Lane remarks in her Preface: 'It is Mariana's artlessness, its enthusiasm, its attention to tiny, telling domestic detail that makes it so appealing to modern readers.'

MARIANA

Contemporary

Penguin

Joy and Josephine: (Penguin Book No. 1168)

Joy and Josephine

Penguin??Books

The Happy Prisoner

Penguin Books, Ltd.

An affair with the unpredictable Joe led to a marriage that Virginia was determined would work. But Joe had no reason to trust or respect women. As he drew her into one humiliating situation after another, Virginia was forced to admit that her romantic dream had turned into a nightmare. 
Great granddaughter to Charles Dickens, Monica (1915-1992) was born into an upper-middle-class family. Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in—she was expelled from St Paul's Girls' School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge—Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair of Hands, in 1939. Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., but the majority of writing continued to be set in Britain. 
Her book of 1953, No More Meadows, reflected her work with the NSPCC and she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of children's books known as the Worlds' End series, which dealt with rescuing animals, and to some extent children. After the death of her husband, in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death, aged 77.

The Angel in the Corner

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