Not only is she being paid a generous salary, her position includes a wonderful cottage, an instant position of respect in the village hierarchy, and the society of wealthy Canon Thornby and his aristocratic sister. “Too good to be true,” is Miss Mayfield’s first impression of her new home. Miss Mayfield might want to watch her words when that friendly cat is hanging about… Off she goes to the rural wilds, to a place very much out of the bustle of the modern world. When Miss Mayfield happens upon an advertisement for a teaching headmistress position at a rural private school she decides to try for it, never dreaming that she would be accepted.Īn interview with the school’s benevolent sponsor, Canon Thornby of the village of Walyk, sees Miss Mayfield hired on the spot. Her health is better, but she harbours deep misgivings over her ability to cope with the stresses of her new teaching position at an inner city London school. She has had some health issues and a vaguely referenced “breakdown” so was sent back to England in the hopes that this would prove beneficial. I had recently read 1964’s How Far to Bethlehem? (with mixed reactions – good writing, but I had issues with the awkwardness of the Bible tie-in plot) so was tuned in to Lofts’ name, as it were, and a casual flip-through was intriguing enough that I squelched my qualms and brought it home.įorty-something Miss Mayfield, a teacher by profession, is back in England after twenty years working at a friend’s private mission school in a remote part of Africa. I must say I would never have picked up this old paperback if it weren’t for Norah Lofts’ name on it the cover illustration not being at all indicative of what a great read was hidden inside.

Norah Lofts, mistress of the art of historical romance, occasionally let herself go in a very different direction and wrote a number of thrillers under the name Peter Curtis, adopting the pseudonym in order to avoid disappointing fans of the romances who would associate her name with a certain type of story. I love these sorts of unexpected developments. Stevenson’s Charlotte Fairlie (which is an appropriate Christmas book for reasons I’ll enlarge on when I return to it) to talk about Norah Lofts’ village-with-dark-secrets instead. But I am so tickled by my discovery of it that I’ve bumped down my review of D.E. This is definitely not a Christmas-time read. Previously published as The Devil’s Own (1960) and The Witches (1966), under the pseudonym Peter Curtis. The Little Wax Doll by Norah Lofts ~ originally published in 1960, and re-released under this title and author’s name in 1970.

The Little Wax Doll by Peter Curtis