While she never married, she was an aunt and great aunt to an extended family, which undoubtedly provided a rich source of material for her work.

Within three years of leaving teaching her earnings from books and short stores had enabled her to have a house built for herself and her mother. In 1919, she published her first Just William story in Home magazine, and turned to writing professionally. Though regarded as an excellent teacher, she was forced to give up aged 33 after contracting polio and losing the use of her right leg. Photograph: Alamyīorn in 1890, clergyman’s daughter Crompton started her adult life as a schoolteacher after becoming involved in the suffragettes at university. The first Just William book by Richmal Crompton. At the time of publication in 1927, the novel was likened to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. Set in a quiet English village that is ruled by Miss Mitcham, who brutally tears apart the lives of those who cross her. The darkest of Crompton’s books to be republished is Leadon Hill. Austen’s Emma Woodhouse would find a companion in arms in Norma Felicity Montague Harborough, the heroine of Felicity Stands By, Sanders said, thanks to Norma’s misguided matchmaking attempts. “They are almost like soap operas, featuring divorce, infidelity and, in every one, a narcissistic character totally lacking in empathy.”Īlthough not rumbustious like the Just William books, Sanders said Crompton revealed a wry sense of humour in the novels, which she likened to Jane Austen’s social observation. “These are much darker than her children’s books and reveal a rather gloomy outlook on life,” said Sanders, publisher of Bello, a digital imprint of Macmillan, which published the titles this week. Featuring sharp-eyed spinsters, young women frustrated by the bounds of convention and hapless but well-meaning sleuths, the titles provide the flipside to English village life so evocatively captured in Crompton’s children’s books. Her comic creation went on to eclipse these works aimed at older readers, but they were bestsellers when they first appeared. The eight books are part of a forgotten backlist written by Crompton before the second world war.

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