VIRAGO OMNIBUS 3: Rosamund Lehmann, Antonia White and Olivia Manning are three of this century's best-lived women novelists. A favourite work by each author has been collected together to create a classic omnibus that is both entertaining and absorbing.

The Weather in the Streets
by Rosamond Lehmann
Introduction by Janet Watts

With a disastrous marriage behind her, Olivia Curtis is still vulnerable and open to love. By chance she meets again her childhood friend Rollo Spencer: now handsome, rich - and married. Suddenly her life is changed to one of secret meetings, brief phone calls, drawn curtains and perfect obedience to the rules of clandestine love.

Frost In May
by Antonia White
Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen

Nanda Grey is nine when she goes to the Convent of the Five Wounds, thirteen when, catastrophically, she leaves. This wonderful tale of a young girl's absorption into a cloistered religious world is much more than a school story - it is a lyrical account of the death of a soul.

All Passion Spent
by Vita Sackville-West
Introduction by Victoria Glendinning

Lady Slane, aged seventeen, nurtures the secret ambition of becoming an artist. She becomes instead a wife and mother of six children. Seventy years later, released by wdowhood, she abandons the family home and retires to a tiny house. Here Lady Slane finds at last a passion, one that comes with the freedom to choose 'simply to be herself'.