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; and her novel John Brown’s Body (1969) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Today, Barker is a marginal figure, often remembered as a ‘writers’ writer’. The label suggests that her writing is in some way difficult, inaccessible to the general reader. This could not be further from the truth. Barker’s stories and novels deal with familiar situations and questions, and are set in unremarkable locations: suburban streets, cul-de-sacs, terraces, parks, hotels, chemists. Barker wrote about the places and people she knew and, I think, for the people she knew, literary or otherwise. She avoided overly ‘high-brow’ publications and, from the outset of her writing career (which began proper in the 1930s at the department of juvenile fiction at the Amalgamated Press), she wrote for ordinary readers.
