Chatterton Square

‘You don’t mean you’re going to divorce him?’ Miss Spanner said with horror.

A sophisticated, emotive novel, Chatterton Square concerns the complex web of relationships between two neighboring families, the Blacketts and the Frasers. Framed by the advance of the Second World War, the subtle mechanics of marriage and love are laid bare through the observation of three of the marital options open to the mid-century woman: unmarried, separated, miserably married. Chatterton Square was published ten years after calls for a change in divorce law resulted in the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937. Despite there being more legal provision for women seeking divorce, the suggestion of it remained shocking, providing the central focus for Young’s novel.

British Library Women Writers 1940's.

Part of a curated collection of forgotten works by early to mid-century women writers, the British Library Women Writers series highlights the best middlebrow fiction from the 1910s to the 1960s, offering escapism, popular appeal and plenty of period detail to amuse, surprise and inform.

Emily Hilda Young (1880–1949) was a prolific British novelist, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1930. Her most successful novel is William, published in 1925, which is still in print today. Her novels often take unconventional households as their subject.