Trying to clear out a few books I found a novel by Angela Thirkell. She loved Anthony Trollope’s set of novels about Barsetshire and wrote about 20 of them updating the county and its inhabitants bringing them into the 20th century. I once read they were the best record of middle class England ever written. Now I realise there is another reason why I loved her books.

I picked up her last one – and one which I can’t discard obviously – and towards the end found this:

I felt just like a leper, like the wicked uncle in The Black Arrow who goes about ringing a bell and saying Unclean, Unclean … and why Stevenson thought so poorly of that book I shall never understand. All my boys loved it. They liked it much better than Treasure Island and Kidnapped except for Alan Breck, of course. And it was the only thing that made me really interested in Richard Crookback, until I read the book by that clever woman with three names*, who proved that Richard didn’t murder the little Princes in the Tower, and was a hero all the time and not a villain.

* “that clever woman with three names” is Elizabeth MacKintosh  (1896–1952), a novelist and playwright who wrote under the pseudonyms Josephine Tey and  Gordon Daviot.  The novel referred to in this passage is A Daughter of Time, which she published as Josephine Tey.

Tags: Books, Richard III