Two very different islands

Reviewing this novel in 1946, when it was first published, Rosamond Lehmann described it as ‘a work of great originality … a blend of fantasy, satire and romantic comedy’. Persephone Books — an imprint dedicated to reprinting forgotten classics by 20th- century women writers — have re-issued it in their now characteristic and classy plain grey dust-jacket plus lush end-papers based on fabric designs.

Miss Ranskill Comes Home is the 46th title in a list that includes Monica Dickens, Noel Streatfield, Katherine Mansfield and Marghanita Laski. Persephone’s website promises books that are ‘neither too literary nor too commercial’ but are ‘guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget’. All three claims are well proven by Barbara Euphan Todd’s novel.

Known mainly as a children’s writer during her lifetime — her stories about Worzel Gummidge the scarecrow being the most popular — Barbara Euphan Todd also wrote poetry and some short adult fiction. Miss Ranskill Comes Home, originally published under her married name, Barbara Bower, was her only novel.

The story opens with Miss Ranskill on a desert island burying her companion of the last four years, a man she calls the Carpenter. Their relationship remains platonic (yes, you do believe it) with Miss Ranskill letting the Carpenter use her vest as a fishing net and he letting her use his braces when her knicker elastic gives way.

But it also becomes ‘a marriage of true minds’ and when Miss Ranskill returns to England she takes with her the survival skills and the moral values she’s learnt from the Carpenter.

Initially the desert island romance appears to be just the wrapping that, once uncovered, allows Todd to develop her satire on English village life during the second world war.