Beyond the glass - Antonia White

Clara Batchelor is twenty-two. Her brief, doomed marriage to Archie over, she returns to live with her parents in the home of her childhood. She hopes for comfort but the devoutly Catholic household confines her and forms a dangerous glass wall of guilt and repression between Clara and the outside world. Clara both longs for and fears what lies beyond, and when she escapes into an exhilarating and passionate love affair her fragile identity cracks.

Beyond the Glass completes the trilogy sequel to Frost in May, which began with The Lost Traveller and The Sugar House. Although each is a complete novel in itself, together they form a brilliant portrait of a young girl's journey to adulthood.

Antonia White (1899-1980) was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton before going to St Paul's School for Girls and training for the stage at RADA. From 1924 until the Second World War she worked as a journalist. Among numerous volumes of short stories, fiction and autobiography, Antonia White published a celebrated quartet of novels linked by their heroine: Frost in May (1922), The Lost Traveller (1950), The Sugar House (1952) and Beyond the Glass (1954).

Last in the Frost in May series, this delicate but powerful novel traces the descent of Clara Batchelor into madness . . . In many ways this is the most impressive of the series, with its bewilderingly honest portrayal of the breakdown of a woman and an artist. Clara's story is partly drawn from White's own collapse, her relationship with Catholicism and the influence of her adored but repressive father
GUARDIAN

An extraordinarily perceptive and yet detached account of the descent into madness
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Antonia White's true brilliance as a writer emerges
NEW STATESMAN