Barbara Noble
Barbara Noble | |
---|---|
Born | North London, England | 1 January 1907
Died | 8 February 2001 England | (aged 94)
Occupation | Publisher, Author |
Nationality | British |
Barbara Noble (1 January 1907 – 8 February 2001) was an English
was instrumental in the publication of thousands of others.Life
Barbara Noble was born on 1 January 1907 in North London. In 1914, the family moved to Brighton, where she was taught at home by her mother. She grew up wanting to be a writer but her first novel, The Years that Take the Best Away was rejected by 13 publishers. It was finally published by Heinemann when she was 22 and was a great critical success.[1] Her second novel, The Wave Breaks came out in 1932 and she moved to London.
After attending secretarial college, she joined
By 1939, Noble had been promoted to the role of London story editor for 20th Century Fox, buying and negotiating film rights for production. In 1943, her fourth novel The House Opposite was published, and in 1946, her fifth, Doreen. It was the story of a child evacuee, torn between two class worlds, one with her charwoman mother in London and another with a middle-class, evacuee 'parents'. It was hugely topical for the time and a "subtle and disturbing examination of the class anxieties permeating wartime Britain."[3] A review in The Spectator called it "a gentle, serious story in which...the author's argument is scrupulously fair ; she is observant, sensitive and intelligent".[4]
Noble's last novel, Another Man's Life, was released the year before she became a book editor. It was the story of the lonely and depressed Simon Hart, who after an attempted suicide off the Thames Bridge takes up the life of his drowned rescuer. The theme of suicide sat badly with some reviewers, with the Saturday Review saying it was a "novel which misses the tragedy but plumbs the dreariness and futility of attempted self-destruction... one wonders cruelly if Simon might not have been better left at the bottom of the river."[5]
In 1953, after 20 years with 20th Century Fox, Barbara Noble took up the role as the UK editor for the American publishing house,
Barbara Noble retired from Doubleday in 1973, but she continued to work as a freelance editor for the publishing house for many years.[1] She died on February 8, 2001 aged 94.
Works
Novels
- The Years that Take the Best Away (1929)
- The Wave Breaks (1932)
- Down by the Salley Gardens (1935)
- The House Opposite (1943) (Reprinted by Dean Street Press in 2019)[8]
- Doreen (1946) (Reprinted by Persephone Books in 2005)
- Another Man's Life (1952)
References
- ^ a b "Barbara Noble".
- ^ Newspaper clipping hebatescompanion.com
- ISBN 9780748627448– via Google Books.
- ^ "Doreen by Barbara Noble".
- ^ ""Fiction Notes" by Ray Pierre, The Saturday Review, Saturday, September 1st, 1951".
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires|journal=
(help) - ^ ISBN 9781899262014– via Google Books.
- ISBN 9780571265084– via Google Books.
- ^ "FURROWED MIDDLEBROW: "Second-grade" love and inconvenient bombs: BARBARA NOBLE, the House Opposite (1943)". 5 October 2018.