Carmen Callil changed British reading habits for ever

She championed hundreds, if not thousands, of women writers. But if she could take just one book with her, she told the bbc radio perennial “Desert Island Discs” in 1992, it would be “Maurice Guest” by Henry Handel Richardson, whose real name was Ethel. Richardson was Australian, as was she. The novel is set in 1890s Leipzig, and is suffused with many of the things she adored: music, art, sex and a certain émigré cosmopolitanism that came from being the child of a Maronite Christian and an Irish Catholic whose forebears had made a new life on the other side of the world. She thought “Maurice Guest” was a masterpiece. That it failed to sell when it first came out in 1908, and failed again when she republished it in 1981, only reinforced her conviction that here was a cause worth mounting the barricades for.