Meridian fiction,

Meg Eliot is perhaps one of the most remarkable portraits of a middle-aged woman in English literature. She boldly debunked the dismal array of stereotypical, female characters of her day and succeeded in forging a life and role for herself beyond her fictional predecessors, influencing a generation of female readers. First published in 1958, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot is the story of a barrister's wife who harbors a great deal of guilt over the privileged life she leads. To assuage this guilt, she occupies her time with charity committees and helping those less fortunate. However, she is forced to confront her own misfortune when she is shockingly and suddenly widowed. Learning slowly to draw on her own strenth and self-worth, Mrs Meg Eliot begins to remake herself as a woman on her own. The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot is a supremely sensitive portrayal of human perseverance and feminine determination.

'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." So begins The Towers of Trebizond, the greatest novel by Rose Macaulay, one of the eccentric geniuses of English literature. In this fine and funny adventure set in the backlands of modern Turkey, a group of highly unusual travel companions makes its way from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond, encountering potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and Billy Graham on tour with a busload of Southern evangelists. But though the dominant note of the novel is humorous, its pages are shadowed by heartbreak as the narrator confronts the specters of ancient empires, religious turmoil, and painful memories of lost love.