I have Lyn to thank for finding this little gem of a book in my library. Persephone Books publishes one of Winifred Peck's novels, House-Bound, which I have in my pile and started reading quite a while ago but got distracted so am hoping to pick it up again some other time. Lyn was actually writing about Anna Katharine Green's The Leavenworth Case, but there was a comment in her discussion thread about Winifred Peck, who also wrote a few detective novels. I only associate her with the Persephone title so was very surprised. Knowing my love of mysteries it's probably not surprising that after reading Lyn's post I went to my library's online catalog to see if we had any of Peck's novels or detective stories. Unfortunately we only have one book, which is a memoir of sorts (reminiscences she calls them) of her education, A Little Learning, or A Victorian Childhood.
I've not been able to find out much about Winifred Peck so far. A Little Learning was published in 1952 and was one of her last books. This is from the Persephone website:
"...she was brilliant, like her brothers, was one of the first forty pupils at the pioneering (and still outstanding) Wycombe Abbey School and went to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford to read History. She married when she was 29 and over the next forty years, as well as having three brilliant sons, wrote twenty-five books, mostly novels."
Penelope Fitzgerald was her niece and was instrumental in getting Persephone to publish what was her own favorite novel of Winifred's. A Little Learning is about her education at Wycombe Abbey School. This is a bit longish, but I wanted to share an excerpt:
"But of these days I only wish to try to recapture one particular aspect. I should have no justification for writing down my general memories unless I wrote of near relatives who would shudder at the suggestion. Nor have I the sort of eventful career which justifies such a book. I have never travelled with rod and gun in the far reaches of the Amazon, nor hob-nobbed with head-hunters or the vanished Courts of the Continent. Nor have I that best qualification of being either over eighty--when few contemporaries remain to feel annoyance--or under forty, when your contemporaries can, and often do, answer back. No, these recollections are confined only to the one department in my life which was unusual, if not unique. In education I can claim the privilege, the doubtful prestige, of a centenarian."
"For from an old-fashioned home I was sent, at the end of the last century, to a school which in outlook and atmosphere had never changed since the period of 1850 or 1860 at least. From that school my devious way led me three years later to a girls' public school which was at least twenty years ahead of its time. I went to Oxford in the days when we still had to take a chaperon for so dangerous a festivity as tea with a brother. I married, so to speak, into the Education Department, and it was not till 1939 that my husband, who was Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Education Department, left that office, though not his interest in the changes which have taken place, and are always taking place in that endless process of education."
This book is just under two hundred pages and seems like it would be quite an interesting read. I'm adding it to my ever growing library stack (I don't want to just bring these books back into circulation but really do want to read them). It's a pity we only have one of her books, as I wouldn't mind seeing what her other fiction is like apart from House-Bound. Still I fully expect to find more hidden gems in my library's stacks in the upcoming weeks. I wonder when the last time Winifred Peck was pulled off the shelf and taken out of the library?