ACUTE MENTAL STRESS

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LVI, Issue 43, 31 May 1935, Page 7

ACUTE MENTAL STRESS

AUTHOR REFUSES PUBLISHER'S

REQUEST.

(From the Guardian's Special Corres-

pondent—By Air Mail)

LONDON, May 4. The production of a novel which has brought fame and fortune to its authoress—a young London schoolteacher—involved such physical and mental strain that when an American publisher asked her to write another book on similar lines she refused.

The writer is Miss Elizabeth Jenkins, of Hampstead, London, who has just been awarded the Femina Vie Heureuse prize—one of the most coveted honours in the literary world —for her novel "Harriet," published last year.

"Harriet" is based on a famous murder at Penge, a London suburb. It describes with squalid realism the starvation and neglect.of a halfwitted drudge, Harriet Staunton, and the circumstances leading up to her death and the trial of the brothers Staunton in 1877.

Miss Jenkins, explaining how the prize-winning novel was written, said: "My brother is a solicitor, and one day in the spring of 1933 I was browsing through one of his legal books—'The Trial of the Stauntons.' The incidents seemed to open up an interesting study in psycho-analysis, and I decided that here was the motif of my next book, it involved a greater strain than any other novel I have attempted. Soon after it was published I received an urgent request from the United States to reconstruct another murder trial in the form of a novel. I cabled back a refusal. Another such book would have landed me in a lunatic asylum, I know.?'