‘I could not put it down,’ people say over and over again about Someone at a Distance (particularly), They Knew Mr Knight, The Priory and They Were Sisters. This is the most frequent comment we get in the shop. Also, she has that great gift of talking directly to the reader and we cannot put the book down until she has finished with us. But she is serviceable, perceptive and humane. You could not take one of her sentences, as you can with, say, Mollie Panter-Downes, and hold it up to the light. Yet analysing Dorothy Whipple’s appeal is tricky. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson is far and away our single bestseller, but Dorothy Whipple, Marghanita Laski and Frances Hodgson Burnett are our bestselling writers. To most of our readers Dorothy Whipple needs no introduction (to use a well-worn cliché) since she is our bestselling novelist. High Wages is the fifth novel by Dorothy Whipple that we have published we have also reprinted a selection of short stories as The Closed Door and Other Stories.
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