For a time, the Welsh novelist Dorothy Edwards was one of the Bloomsbury set. After reading Greek and philosophy at university, she began writing short stories and then in 1928 came her only novel, Winter Sonata. In the late 1920s she met David “Bunny” Garnett. He said: “She was one of the very few young women for whom I felt absolutely no sexual attraction at all”, but he admired her literary talents and “adopted” her as his sister.
Bunny introduced her to Virginia Woolf, who “seemed vague, but full of friendly astonishment”, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey. However, over time she fell out of favour with them and Garnett became irritated by “her clumsy homemade dresses and her lack of any form of corset”. The rejection hurt Edwards badly; in 1934, aged 31, she returned to Wales and threw herself under a train, leaving a suicide note in the pocket of her mackintosh.
I bought a second-hand copy of Winter Sonata after Edwards’s work was recommended recently on Backlisted, a podcast that celebrates classic reads. It is an ambitious novel, set in a backwater English village over the course of a winter, that throws together a group of characters from different social classes and watches as they fall in love, irritate and judge each other. It’s full of amusing observations of the minutiae of village life and human foibles. It’s clever too; the novel imitates a musical sonata as it weaves together these characters in dramatic juxtaposition.
Winter Sonata by Dorothy Edwards, Virago Modern Classics, 244pp