Middling

The Middling: Chapters in the Life of Ellie Toms by A. L. Barker was described by Rebecca West as 'The finest book written by a woman in our time.'

As a child, Ellie compulsively lies her way into trouble. How else can she escape the reality of being a railway clerk's daughter in a Crystal Palace villa?

She wants to love, but it never seems to work out right. She idealizes a beautiful school friend, only to uncover (with morbid fascination) a strange relationship between her friend and a middle-aged chemist. Her first affair is too good to last. It leads to a pregnancy and an uneasy menage a trois, which finally erupts into brutal vengeance.

After fifteen years of struggling with a marriage to the wrong man, Ellie starts drinking. It seems as good an escape as any at first. But it's another mistake. . .

A. L. Barker (1918-2002) was a short story writer and novelist. Born in St Paul's Cray, Kent, she lived in the same milieu where London borders on Kent and Surrey, for the rest of her life. As her Oxford DNB entry says it was 'the chief setting for her work, which often seemed to partake of the quotidian mysteriousness and even abandonment of these areas.' Her first selection of short stories, Innocents, won the Somerset Maugham award in 1947. Of her short stories, Robert Nye has written, 'stories as carefully composed as poems, quiet and delicate and reserved perhaps, but oddly lingering in the mind.' Although a stranger to commercial success, she never wanted for admirers, Jane Gardam, Francis King, Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, John Sutherland, Deborah Moggach, Ronald Blythe, Susan Hill, A. S. Byatt, Adam Mars-Jones, Nina Bawden and Victoria Glendinning being just some of them. A. L. Barker deserves to be better known. Faber Finds is proud to be reissuing her entire oeuvre, six volumes of short stories - Innocents, Novelette with Other Stories, Femina Real, Life Stories, No Words of Love and Element of Doubt - and thirteen novels - Apology for a Hero, A Case Examined, The Joy-Ride and After, Lost Upon the Roundabouts, The Middling, John Brown's Body, Source of Embarrassment, A Heavy Feather, Relative Successes, The Gooseboy, The Woman Who Talked to Herself, Zeph and The Haunt.