Press Coverage Autumn 2003

‘The Blank Wall is on the one hand an illustration of the old adage, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practise to deceive,”’ wrote Lady Antonia Fraser in The Spectator. ‘On the other hand it is a brilliant psychological thriller with twists and turns, both morally and amorally, worthy of the great Patricia Highsmith herself ... [although] Sanxay Holding was Highsmith’s senior by thirty-two years. That admirable institution, Persephone Books, has produced an edition, complete with Edward Bawdenesque endpapers, which makes this racy, suspenseful tale a pleasure to read. I certainly feel I have been introduced to a masterpiece.’

In The Observer Gaby Wood devoted a ‘World of Books’ column to The Blank Wall, ‘in my opinion, a perfect thriller – because its thrills arise accidentally, incidentally, and then, in collusion with human nature, conspire to take over the plot... Who really did it, and whether they get caught, becomes almost superfluous. Here the suspense is embedded in a tragedy of manners. The story is mostly conveyed in free indirect speech, so that you are both with Lucia and not with her... The plot engine is Lucia’s noble and protective urge to keep up appearances... a classic of supense fiction.’

In the Financial Times Ludo Hunter-Tilney noticed ‘an unmistakable vein of high camp through the book. But there’s a degree of sophistication here too. The writing vividly evokes the fluttering of Lucia’s panicked mind. Her relationships with those around her are interestingly ambiguous, and through them are refracted themes of race, class, justice and gender... a satisfying noir melodrama.’ And the Guardian's Maxim Jakubowski concluded that ‘Sanxay Holding is a striking precursor to the likes of Highsmith and Rendell, and turns the psychological screws with insidious accuracy.’

In the Guardian two of our books were picked as choices for Summer Reading: Shena MacKay thought that ‘Julia Strachey’s 1932 novella Cheerful Weather for the Wedding has lost none of its surreal charm. This Persephone reprint would make a subversive present for a summer bride, or her mother. A brilliant, bittersweet upstairs-downstairs comedy.’ And Sarah Waters was ‘fascinated by Noel Streatfeild's 1945 novel Saplings, a study of the disintegration of a middleclass family during the turmoil of the Second World War and quite shocking.’

In The Sunday Telegraph's Summer Reading feature Jessica Mann chose The Blank Wall as a ‘highly enjoyable period piece [which] plausibly evokes nightmarish events.’

In the same paper Bee Wilson recommended the source of what is ‘perhaps the most exotic breakfast of all, the one that almost none of us now eat: the true English breakfast. In Good Things in England Florence White lists some of the savoury viands once common on a morning sideboard: oxtail mould, pork cheese, potted beef, fried sprats, devilled kidneys. All that is long gone.’

Matthew Dennison wrote in The Tablet about The Priory: ‘Much of the novel is taken up with the disillusionments of love, sketched with wonderful skill. But, though poignant, this is not an unhappy novel. Whipple delivers the ending every romantic reader will hope for in a manner that is both believable and satisfying. In so doing she involves the reader in a central tenet of the novel’s philosophy – that hope is rewarded. Ultimately in The Priory hope and love carry all before them. The reader’s knowledge that war is just around the corner contributes a final, sharp poignancy to a totally involving novel by a writer who deserves to be better known.’