Description
Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city—and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But as Rachel sings and jokes the days away, her new neighbors begin to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.
In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam’s oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.
About the Author
Stephen Royce Benatar (born 26 March 1937) is an English author from London. His first published novel, The Man on the Bridge, was published in 1981. His second novel, Wish Her Safe at Home, was published in 1982 and reissued in 2007 and 2010. He is known for self-publishing and self-promoting his novels.His first novel, written at the age of 19 and titled A Beacon In the Mist, was rejected, as were 11 subsequent novels. At the age of 44 his novel The Man on the Bridge was accepted by Harvester, and edited by Catharine Carver. He received a £400 advance for the novel. His second published novel, Wish Her Safe at Home, was published by The Bodley Head the following year. The book was inspired by the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. It was runner-up for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He also won an Arts Council bursary. One novel, Such Men Are Dangerous, was published by Scunthorpe Borough Council. However, sales of his published books were poor, and he took to self-publishing subsequent novels, including Father Of The Man, Recovery and The Golden Voyage Of Samson Groves.In 2007, he tried to get Wish Her Safe at Home republished as a Penguin Classic but they turned him down despite an introduction by Professor John Carey hailing it as a masterpiece. He was turned down by 36 other publishers, so after slightly rewriting some of the passages he self-published 4,000 copies under his own Welbeck Classics imprint. He bumped into a man when returning some leftover wine from his book launch, and asked him to look at his book; that man was Edwin Franks, the managing editor of The New York Review of Books's publishing arm. Franks "read the book straight away and was knocked out", and The New York Review of Books published the novel in January 2010. Screen rights have been bought by a screenwriter who met Benatar in a bookshop, Henry Fitzherbert. In March 2011, Capuchin Classics will re-issue When I Was Otherwise in the UK with an introduction by academic Gillian Carey. Manuscripts and proofs of plays and novels by Benatar are archived by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, along with drafts, short stories, notebooks, research material, book review, and letters.
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