{"title":"Books by Gertrude Trevelyan","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781915812063","title":"William’s Wife","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhen Jane marries the elderly grocer William Chirp, she thinks she has moved up into the comfort of middle class. Instead, she discovers that William exerts a control over her life that forces her to live like a prisoner. His tight fistedness and suspicions so affect Jane that even after his death, she finds herself trapped in a penny pinching paranoia and resorts to scavenging for food out of garbage bins and taking her silverware with her everywhere in a shopping bag. Utterly forgotten for over 80 years, neither the book nor its author are mentioned in any history of 20 th century English literature. Yet Trevelyan is arguably the finest novelist of the generation to follow Virginia Woolf and William’s Wife is one of the most powerful psychological portraits in all fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs a story about a woman at the mercy of a domineering and abusive husband, William’s Wife is a novel still resonant and relevant in today’s world. Even more, it’s one of the most effective accounts of the onset and experience of mental illness, of a paranoia and miserliness that gradually takes over Jane Chirp’s life and leads her to move to ever more cramped and dingy flats where she surrounds herself with her belongings like a besieged hermit.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205906530482,"sku":"9781915812063","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781915812063.jpg?v=1786030437"},{"product_id":"9781915812445","title":"Trance by Appointment","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTrance by Appointment\u003c\/em\u003e is the story of Jean, an otherwise ordinary working-class London girl. But Jean has what her mother calls “the Sight.” She sees what no one else can: the future. At first, under the patient guidance of Madame Eva, she learns to control this talent and begins to work as a fortune-teller.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut once Jean falls under the influence of Norman, an unscrupulous astrologer, she is exploited as a money-making machine, driven relentlessly to perform seances for exclusive clients. Norman treats Jean as a dumb animal with a uniquely saleable skill and subjects her to physical and emotional abuse in quest of profits. Telling Jean’s story through her eyes and words, Gertrude Trevelyan’s demonstrates an uncanny insight into the gift and curse of an exceptional power.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308997620085,"sku":"9781915812445","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781915812445_ba2d5ff7-8f34-43d2-afa7-48159e4316b1.jpg?v=1786030450"},{"product_id":"9781913861858","title":"Two Thousand Million Man-Power","description":"\u003cp\u003e‘A 20th century literary classic!’ This was best-selling novelist Rachel Hore’s reaction when asked to introduce Gertrude Trevelyan’s 1937 novel\u003ci\u003e Two Thousand Million Man-Power\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUtterly forgotten for over 80 years, neither the book nor its author are mentioned in any history of 20th century English literature. Yet Trevelyan is arguably the finest novelist of the generation to follow Virginia Woolf and \u003ci\u003eTwo Thousand Million Man-Power\u003c\/i\u003e is among her greatest achievements.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is a masterly piece of social realism that traces the lives of a young London couple set against a background of rapid technological, ideological and political change, and satirizes contemporary bourgeois life and its fashionable interwar belief in endless progress.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBeginning on New Year’s Eve, 1919, \u003ci\u003eTwo Thousand Million Man-Power\u003c\/i\u003e follows Katherine and Robert, as university graduates, through almost 20 years of British history. Starting as idealistic radicals, they become comfortable middle-class consumers, only to then be plunged into unemployment and poverty when the stock market crashes. Trevelyan’s portrait of life in the 1920s and 1930s is as fierce and gripping as George Orwell’s \u003ci\u003eThe Road to Wigan Pier\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eTwo Thousand Million Man-Power\u003c\/i\u003e continues the mission of \u003cb\u003eRecovered Books\u003c\/b\u003e series to rescue exceptional books long unavailable to today’s readers.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309354004853,"sku":"9781913861858","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913861858_2ad3a709-341f-43c0-9547-6db21382d113.jpg?v=1786030699"},{"product_id":"9781915812124","title":"As It Was in the Beginning","description":"\u003cp\u003eOne of the most audacious of all modernist novels. Millicent, Lady Cheseborough -- fifty, widowed, rejected by her much younger lover -- lies dying in a nursing home, the victim of a stroke. As she nears death, her thoughts go back through her life in a desperate attempt to find its meaning.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith great stylistic daring, Gertrude Trevelyan recreates the stream of consciousness in its most realistic and moving form. As It Was in the Beginning is perhaps Trevelyan's most important work, a novel that belongs with To the Lighthouse or As I Lay Dying.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313185730933,"sku":"9781915812124","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781915812124_17d55638-622a-41a1-bc19-08d256d16824.jpg?v=1786030440"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-gertrude-trevelyan.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}