Girls school fantasy triumph

After gentle lobbying from colleagues, callers and commenters, the TLS Editor's 'Buried Treasures Award' for an unjustly neglected work of literature can finally be announced.

An invitation last week from the excellent Martin Levin at the Toronto Globe and Mail called for a single choice for this prize, something not totally obscure but a work deserving a little more light

A quick look among my bookshelves at home produced a shortlist of six (see post) - ranging from a 'wrist-slashing' depression-bringer, to a bisexual detective yarn and the memoirs of an amateur brothel-keeper.

New suggestions here included John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible.

 'The first novel from the author of 'A Confederacy of Dunces', and a work of genius. The crumbling hopelessness of life in a small US town dominated by Protestant fundamentalism, seen through the eyes of a sensitive and gifted adolescent', wrote Michael Buhagiar.

'Susie' offered the genuinely obscure and  forgotten Within and Without: remembered from her adolescence as a compelling erotic gem, all the more so because it was written in a straightforward male first-person form.

 'I could visualise the slender orange Penguin Book with its sketch of a female art student on the cover, the colour of whose voluminous hair was likened variously to whisky and toffee (how I envied that silky mane). Last night I managed to locate the book among various tottering skyscrapers of old books, and find it is by John Harvey (born 1925, presumably not the crime writer creator of Resnick)and published in 1960'.

There were supporters for  London Belongs To Me, a 700-page yarn of lowish-life in 1938  by the founder of BBC Woman's Hour and pioneer TV boss, Norman Collins. But but it has been just republished as a Penguin Modern Classic so perhaps is no longer 'buried' enough'. Is it a treasure? I am so far half way through it and have an open mind.

The winner, with eloquent support at the TLS, was The Finishing Touch, the book that Brigid Brophy called her 'lesbian fantasy'.

Why?

Since the original question came from the Globe and Mail, the answer will have to appear there first.