Strangers (original 1954; edition 1981)

Antonia White's literary reputation rests upon her acclaimed quartet of novels -- Frost in May, The Lost Traveller, The Sugar House, and Beyond the Glass (all Virago Modern Classics) --works that chart with extraordinary precision and intensity a young Catholic girl's growth to maturity in the first decades of this century. With the completion of this quartet White wrote no more novels. She turned her attention to short stories, which represent some of her finest writing. These seven stories, written between 1928 and 1943, reiterate the themes that recur throughout White's work: the pains and joys of growing up and falling in and out of love; the borderlands between love and loneliness, sanity and madness, belief and the loss of faith. Perhaps the most extraordinary story is "Surprise Visit," in which the herioine vists the London War Museum -- the building that previously housed the mental hospital in which she had been incarcerated years before. Antonia White's ever-growing audience will welcome this collection of her short fiction, never before published in the United States.