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Abstract

Novelist, journalist, and radio and television personality, famous for her liberal humanist beliefs. In Ecstasy (1961) and Everyday Ecstasy (1980), Laski enquired into transcendental experiences and their personal and social effects. She wrote five novels. The Victorian Chaise Longue (1953) is a chilling example of female Gothic, while Little Boy Lost (1949) — adapted for the screen in 1953 — and The Village (1953) both deal poignantly with the aftermath of the Second World War. Love on the Supertax (1944) and Tory Heaven, or Thunder on the Right (1948) satirize the British class system. She also ventured into CHILDREN’S LITERATURE with Ferry the Jerusalem Cat (1983) and into drama with The Offshore Island (1954), about a group of survivors after a nuclear war. Her interest in nineteenth-century women writers finds expression in lavishly illustrated biographies of Jane Austen and George Eliot and in an edited critical collection on Charlotte Yonge. She was an astute reviewer and provided the first serious critical engagement with Daphne DU MAURIER’s work in an anonymous review in The Times Literary Supplement. She also submitted some 250,000 illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary. She has received no attention from critics.