First edition, second printing. 124pp. Red cloth boards, gilt-stamped lettering to spine. Slim 8vo. Cloth rounded on corners and spine ends. Internally neat. clean, bright and tight. In its original illustrated dust wrapper. Dust wrapper rubbed and bumped at edges, slightly sunned over spine, not price clipped.
Mary Keene wrote Mrs Donald i the early 1950s. Her literary friends thought very highly of it but it failed to find a publisher at the time. First published in 1983, edited by Alice Thomas Ellis, it is a fascinating literary discovery. A moving of a particular sort of hell, Mrs Donald is a widow, living a mean life, bringing up five children in the midst of East End poverty. She is a braggart and a bully, constantly bemoaning her own woes as her children, sulky and moody, mope around the house. and longing for the day they can escape their mother. But terrifying as she is, Mrs Donald has a sort of dignity and it is a tribute to Mary Keene's writing that she can create a poignant portrait of children battered by an monstrous mother while the reader is moved to sympathy for both.
Mary Keen (1921-81) was born in circumstances similar to those portrayed in this novel. Her right foot was amputated after she was knocked down by a lorry at the age of 11. Her schooling ended early and she floated from sweatshop work to modelling for artists, frequently hungry. She drifted towards Fitzrovia, where she was befriend by writers and artists, including Louis MacNeice (who wrote a poem about her), Henry Green, Elizabeth Smart, Dylan Thomas and Augustus John (for whom she sat). She married film director Ralph Keene in 1941 and their daughter Alice was born the following year. She frequently sat for Matthew Smith before her early death from cancer in 1981.
