Marguerite Reilly

First published in 1946, Marguerite Reilly traces the story of an Irish immigrant family across four generations, from the time of the Irish famine up to the second world war, as they struggle to survive and educate their children. A "must read" for anyone with Anglo-Irish heritage. 

“The book engages the reader’s attention from the first page. It is acutely observed and beautifully written” - The Spectator

“A formidable piece of characterisation” - The Fifeshire Advertiser

"A dominating, deplorable and heroic character, on a scale that English fiction seldom affords” -  Elizabeth Bowen, The Tatler

Elizabeth Lake was the pen-name adopted by Inez Pearn, a girl from a working-class background who won a scholarship to Oxford in the 1930s to study Spanish literature. She was active in the campaign for Britain to support the Spanish Republic and was later involved in the Mass Observation movement. She wrote five novels. Along the way she mixed with a host of contemporary artists and intellectuals, including Marghanita Laski, Sally Graves, Phillip Toynbee, A J Ayer, the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy and the painter Sir William Coldstream, whose portrait of her is held in the Tate Britain. She was briefly married to Stephen Spender and subsequently, more enduringly, to the poet and sociologist Charles Madge.