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Dear Dodie | From the Slightly Foxed archives: Valerie Grove on Look Back with Love

Dear Dodie | From the Slightly Foxed archives: Valerie Grove on Look Back with Love

Greetings from No. 53 where we’ve been busy with subscriptions, renewals and book orders thanks to those of you who’ve been adding to your Foxed reading lists. We’re very grateful as the office is now looking shipshape and ready for the arrival of the spring quarter’s offerings in just a few weeks’ time.

Before we look ahead to the new season, we’re looking back through the SF archives. This article by Valerie Grove appears as the preface to our pocket paperback edition of Dodie Smith’s Look Back with Love, in which we meet the funny, complicated, creative young reader who became a much beloved writer.

She remembers discovering reading (‘what I hankered for most were books about large families of children to whom nothing worrying ever happened’). She loves Shaw’s prefaces, and Thackeray and Dumas, but not Dickens or Hardy, and it still puzzles her that she never took to Trollope: ‘He writes the kind of books I should so much enjoy, if only I did.’

We hope you’ll enjoy reading Valerie’s article. If you do, and are tempted to add Look Back with Love to your SF collection, then then you’ll find links to this edition below, along with other tempting titles you may have a hankering for.

With best wishes from the SF office staff
Jennie, Anna, Hattie, Jess & Helen

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