Very pleased recently to turn up Stevie Davies’ website and find that I am not in fact the only person who appreciates her. Which would be a great shame; she is a writer of wide repertoire, uncomfortable integrity and elegant knotty prose. If there is theme that she revisits, it is militarization (particularly of women’s lives) and brutality, from her first novel Boy Blue, through Arms and the Girl to her latest The Element of Water, in which the children of former Nazis meet and watch the old racial cruelties replayed on the intimate stage of a girl’s school in 1958.

Then there is her gently satirical look at Bronte fandom (she is herself a Bronte scholar, author of Emily Bronte: Heretic) in Four Dreamers and Emily, her – again uncompromising – story of a death in Closing the Book, her study of a ‘good woman’ in The Web of Belonging, and Impassioned Clay in which an inoclastic woman explores and imagines the life and death of a seventeenth century woman found with her head encased in a scold’s bridle. The last ties in with her interest in that torn and rowdy century, about which she wrote in Impassioned

Spirits: Women of the English Revolution: 1640-1660.

Why she is a must-read: that elegant knotty prose, the versatility, the scholarship, the uncompromisingness – Arms and the Girl is heartbreaking, a brutal tragedy of child who is a scapegoat and a child who is a victim; its final scenes are painful to read. After what January and Prue have suffered, there is no healing – the exquisite descriptions, the feminism, the occasional playfulness, the sense of life as (to quote the last sentences of Four Dreamers): “And then again the sunlight./ And the shadow again.”