Barker’s fiction was highly regarded in her own lifetime, most memorably by Rebecca West who wrote of Barker’s third novel: ‘You should ask your vet to put you down if you do not admire The Middling.’* Barker won the inaugural Somerset Maugham Award in 1947 with her first collection, Innocents; a...
“Be as the well, bottomless, not as the pump that needs priming.” But he was the pump and the priming he needed was sight of her. He had to wait through eight and a half hours of gestures of work and then when he got home to Lilliput Lodge, Tomelty was there. She had arran...