My Best Book:

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20077, 6 April 1935, Page 12

My Best Book:

Authors are naturally reluctant to name, with any emphasis, the book they would like to be judged by, but an English journal managed to persuade eighteen famous writers to declare their preference for their own work. Below are extracts from their written pronouncements:— “7 still hope my best work is to be written,” said Edmund Blunden, “but even so, I have no faculty for judging what I write myself” '7 consider ‘The Miracle Boy’ my best book,” confesses Louis Golding, “because it is in a very real sense the most completely created and creative of my writings.” “If I had to choose from my published works those by which I should prefer to be judged,” confesses (Mrs) Henry Handel Richardson, “I should name “The Way Home” and “Ultimate Thule,” because they are my last, and because I think I have mastered my material better in those than in the earlier books.” “I consider my best book up to the present is my ‘Herries Chronicle,’ ” says Hugh Walpole. “I think this is the best of my books because the Cumberland County is at the back of it, and because the romantic spirit is sustained in it from first to last, and because it is the most English of my books. Otherwise, I think “The Dark Forest’ is my best book, because it is both the most realistic and the most romantic.” “To the rest of my books,” says Roy Campbell, “I prefer “The Georgiad.” It is a full statement of creed only vaguely formulated in “The Flaming Terrapin,” and “Adamastor,” than that it had a greater success, though the latter was boosted by the moneyed-literary press. “The Georgiad,” not only sailed through the combined resistance of the Press (which derides it), but it confirms my faith in the winged poetic ivords and the futility of modern literary journalism.”