The Woman in the Hall
She didn’t want men to be in love with her. She wanted power and a dangerous gamble and the fun of winning and putting herself over as a sweet saviour, till at last she came to believe it herself.
Lorna Blake is a woman able to create her own reality: a swindler with nerves of steel, gifted manipulator and devoted single mother to two daughters. When her eldest needs lifesaving treatment she cannot afford, Lorna begins a risky but thrilling scheme; taking her daughters to the hallways of London mansions to beg with tales of a husband at turns dangerous, deserting and dead. But as years pass and Lorna continues to wring pity and pounds from wealthy strangers, her victims start closing in.
Acted out in the hallways of London mansions and across several continents, The Woman in the Hall is part psychological drama, part cat-and-mouse chase, as well as a darkly comic portrait of how the figure of a single mother could wring pity from 1930s society.
G. B. Stern (1890-1973) was a prolific writer best known in her lifetime for her series The Matriarch: a lightly autobiographical saga of two cosmopolitan Jewish families, struggling through the aftermath of the 1928 financial crash. She was also a playwright and saw several of her books adapted onto screen, including The Woman in the Hall in 1947.
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