Monica Dickens

Why haven't I ever read Monica Dickens? Probably because I tend not to read women writers - except Jane Austen and a few detective novelists.... O yes, and one or two by Joanna Trolloppe. Now I am tempted to, just having read a review of one of her books in The Spectator: "The Winds of Heaven". It's about a woman with three grown-up children whose "ghastly" husband dies leaving her with nothing but depts, no house, a few clothes. She loses all feeling of dignity. She is "like a child who has got lost on a church outing". Her daughters devise a plan: she will live with each in turn for a while in the summer and, in the winter, she can live on the Isle of Wight at a friend's hotel - at a cut price.
So, as one of offspring puts it, she is "passed around from one to another like a mangy cheese". Nicely put! Or "a surplus piece of furniture". Very nice! She is simply not wanted.
Then, in the great tradition of female romance best represented these days by our old freinds Mills and Boon, a man comes on the scene. But not one of your clean-cut, handsome, chisel-featured men of fortune who will love you like an ape as well as care for you like a father; no, her Lohengrin is a "grossly overweight, diabetic department-store beds salesman who moonlights as a writer of sixpenny thrillers" (Hah! thought there's be a sliver of culture in there somewhere trying to get out).
But, says the reviewer, there's more than " a splendidly happy ending: the novel ontains everything a publisher could ask for", there's also "the universal figure, a sorrowful outsider.... at odds with an unfeeling world".
Reminds me of Ozu's "Tokyo Story" and E. Eynon Evans's play with the same theme.
Can't wait to read it.
Wasn't she a grandaughter of Charles Dickens or something?