But it is an incident that will have a profound effect on her. But, it is true, the books can be perceived as a little everyday: the short story in the latest biannually, for example, which was discovered for us by the actor Benjamin Whitrow – Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice – is neither thrilling nor profound, it is just an incident in a young girl’s life. I think it is simply because she creates such alive and realistic characters – if Ellen in Someone at a Distanceor Lucy in They Were Sisterswalked into the shop, we would recognise them. Unfortunately, readability is not a quality that is studied in universities thus no literary critic has ever defined what makes Dorothy Whipple’s domestic, everyday books so gripping. ‘I could not put it down,’ people say over and over again about Someone at a Distance (particularly), They Knew Mr Knight, The Priory and They Were Sisters. This is the most frequent comment we get in the shop. Also, she has that great gift of talking directly to the reader and we cannot put the book down until she has finished with us.

But she is serviceable, perceptive and humane. You could not take one of her sentences, as you can with, say, Mollie Panter-Downes, and hold it up to the light.

Yet analysing Dorothy Whipple’s appeal is tricky.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson is far and away our single bestseller, but Dorothy Whipple, Marghanita Laski and Frances Hodgson Burnett are our bestselling writers. To most of our readers Dorothy Whipple needs no introduction (to use a well-worn cliché) since she is our bestselling novelist. High Wages is the fifth novel by Dorothy Whipple that we have published we have also reprinted a selection of short stories as The Closed Door and Other Stories.

High Wages by Dorothy Whipple