Elizabeth Troop's first novel, A Fine Country, was published in 1969, but it was not until Woolworth Madonna (1976) that she began to attract critical attention. Since then she has enjoyed an especially fruitful phase in her career as a writer of both fiction and of radio drama and features. Two novels have followed; Slipping Away (1979) and Darling Daughters (1981), the latter published in both England and the United States. She has also written eleven radio plays during the last five years (including adaptations of her novels), and is currently at work on a new novel provisionally entitled "Losing It."

She was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, in 1931 and her childhood there, during the Depression and the war, obviously forms the basis of her most recent novel, Darling Daughters. From this novel it would seem that, as an only child of a disintegrating marriage, she acquired an almost precocious awareness of the...