October 24, 1915

Marghanita Laski (October 24, 1915 to February 6, 1988) was a British novelist and critic. Her father was a solicitor (QC). Her uncle was Harold Laski, the politician and theorist. Marghanita Laski was educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Her husband was the publisher, John Eldred Howard, whom she married in 1937. As is typical in a vibrant intellectual culture, Laski was a public figure, appearing on the radio and television, besides writing.

The fiction she wrote or edited includes:

Love on the Supertax  (1944)
The Patchwork Book (anthology) (1946)
To Bed with Grand Music (pseudonymous novel) (1946)
(ed) Stories of Adventure, (1947)
(ed) Victorian Tales, (1948)
Tory Heaven  (1948)
Little Boy Lost (1949)
The Village  (1952)
The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953)
The Offshore Island (play) 1959.

The nonfiction of Marghanita Laski includes:

Mrs Ewing, Mrs Molesworth, Mrs Hodgson Burnett (criticism) (1950)
Ecstasy: A study of some secular and religious experiences (1961)
Domestic Life in Edwardian England (1964)
(ed, with E.G. Battiscombe) A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge (1965)
The Secular Responsibility (Conway Memorial Lecture) (1967)
Jane Austen and her World (1969)
George Eliot and her World (1973)
Kipling’s English History (1974) (radio programmes on Kipling, 1973, 1983)
Everyday Ecstasy (1980).

From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling Abroad and at Home (1987) was one of several posthumous publications.

Marghanita Laski then did not write for children but once. Here is the cover for
Ferry the Jerusalem Cat (1983):