Alice has, but I haven't - yet!
Catherine Gaskin's is a name I know from years ago as I have a feeling my mother and grandmother read her books. I have never done so but I do now have The Property of a Gentleman
I have done a little reading around, finding out a bit about this bestselling author, and I learn that although she was born in Ireland she grew up in Australia; despite early ambitions to become a pianist she wrote her first novel when she was only 15; it came out when she was 17 and sold 50,000 copies in its first two months, so her path was set. She moved to London shortly afterwards, married an American, and lived in the US, Ireland and the Isle of Man before returning to Australia in her later years. She died in 2009 at the age of 80. You can read more about her here, and do listen to her Desert Island Discs on which, in conversation with Roy Plomley, she comes across as a very vivacious lady.
What of the books, though? There are 21 novels, published between 1946 and 1988, and despite the very high profile she had while active, selling 40,000,000 copies, Catherine Gaskin said that she "was resigned to becoming obsolete in her own lifetime". She's been proved right, as far as I can gather, in that "the girl with the golden pen", as she was once called, is now out of print here except for the recently released The Property of a Gentleman.
A popular success, dubbed "the queen of storytellers"; have you read her?
