First edition, 1969, London, Heinemann

Boston, Little, Brown 1970 First American Edition

'Miss Pomfret was no fool. Fresh from the haunts of coot and hern though she was (the quotation subsequently produced by Mrs. Ramillies), she appreciated both the girl's and her own situation accurately enough: each displaced, each husbandless, and fortunate in having found male protection. Nor was she above taking a hint from Rosa as to how that male benevolence could be best assured.

"After dinner I do not sit," explained Rosa. "I do not even take coffee"

"I'm sure I always like an early bed myself," agreed Miss Pomfret.

"During the day, I am so occupied, I need no attention at all," said Rosa.

"I've brought my paint box," said Miss Pomfret.'

Thus the ground rules in the Yorkshire country house are neatly laid, an early indication that Rosa is a young woman who knows her own mind and how things should be run. While she has her feet firmly planted on the ground, her life is spiced with the eccentricities of others--Sir Charles, lord of the manor and much given to bathing outdoors in the nude while reading The Times; Miss Phoebe Pomfret, who travels with two cats, a baby fox, and once wrote on piece on 'The Beauty of Mosses', and young Paul Braithwaite, who has an artistic way with caricatures and seduction.

First Edition London, Heinemann 1971

First American Boston Little, Brown 1972

Reprint Boston, G.K. Hall 1973 (large print edition)

'My father was a connoisseur of wine; but times and incomes change and we with them, and now I am a connoisseur of weather. Thus I remember distinctly the day of Cecilia's return as being cool (for mid-April), but not cold; showery rather than rainy, also with a peculiar tang in the air that seems to presage not summer but autumn. Oddly enough, the day she died some five months later, in October, had a rather springlike feeling--though this of course may have been subconscious on my part.'

Thus we are given a clue to the strange place this story eventually leads us--a right and happy ending, it is true, but we're not sure we can feel right and happy about the ending. (oh, the places 'the end justifies the means' has taken us in fiction!) It's also unusual in that Sharp writes first person--a rarity--and she writes with such honest detail one feels as though she has lived these odd and tender moments. But this is a compelling story of a retarded girl who is left to live with an elderly friend of the family. The friendship that develops with the little girl and the older woman, how the older woman ("I do not love easily") becomes a fierce protector--is deeply touching. Written with insight and truth into the flickering, shadowed world of 'the innocents--it has been called 'perhaps [her] most poignant and affecting story.'

First Edition- London, Heinemann 1973

First American Boston, Little, Brown 1973

'Faced with so enormous and complex a subject as the Lost Chapel Picnic (six miles each way, on bicycles), one hardly knows where to start. To any member of the Bly family it is like starting to write about the French Revolution, or the United States of America--there is so much to bring in. Nor can one safely generalize; even the statement that it took place every summer, for instance, at once calls to mind the summers when it didn't, such as 1927 (chicken-pox) and 1940 (Battle of Britain). Only its essential characteristic was constant: the Lost Chapel picnic always took place in rain.'

'The Lost Chapel Picnic' ( a wonderful reminiscence of family, place, and shared good times) is only one of several delightful stories in this collection. Twelve, to be exact, listed here:

The Lost Chapel Picnic
Mr. Hamble's Bear
George Lambert and Miss P
Thief of Time
The Girl in the Grass
Interlude at Spanish Harbour
The Snuff Box
Seal Tregarthen's Cousin
Driving Home
The Girl in the Leopard Skin Pants
The Amethyst Cat
At the Fort Flag

These stories have had other appearances, but this is their first time to be collected together. 'Seal Tregarthen's Cousin', for example, was first printed in Harper's magazine of November, 1939. 'The Amethyst Cat' appeared in a later anthology of cat stories.

'Mr. Hamble's Bear' (a quaint and quirky tale of a large stuffed bear who was always losing umbrellas) was first published as 'Very Much Alive' by Macfadden Publications, Inc. in 1942.

First Edition-London, Heinemann, 1975

First American Boston, Little, Brown, 1975

"A womaniser approaching eighty, especially one who has womanised for far longer than appears credible, let alone decent, cannot be surprised when medical opinion pronounces him practically off the hooks. Old Jacob Arbuthnot took the warning in good part, and sent for his lawyer. In the case (soon to be coffin), of old Jacob, he was expected to cut up for some thirty thousand pounds--at that date, 1860, a considerable fortune--and known to be completely indifferent to his few surviving kin."

Old Jacob Arbuthnot survives long enough to disappoint his relations--leaving his fortune in the form of a trust called The Copstock Foundation. Its sole purpose--and cynically so--is to benefit aged and impecunious servants. Thus over the ensuing decades a host of bedraggled, ribald scrubwomen and housekeepers, port-pickled cooks, dessicated governesses, shabby, shuffling lady's maids and other colorful but worthy recipients come in for their share of a timely 'fiver or tenner', while giving back to the trustees a surprising wealth of knowledge about London's 'below-stairs' world. A lively, pungent tale, replete with the usual Sharp good humor, and called a 'shewd and vivid panorama of that mistress-domestic relationship'.

First edition-London, Heinemann 1977

First American Boston, Little, Brown 1977

"Plain (she resembled her father) and aware of it, painfully shy and inclined to read poetry, [Flora] found the mistress-ship of Cotton Hall nothing but a burden; and however inadequate as a housekeeper would have been still less adequate as its hostess, but fortunately there was no entertaining to be done. Indeed it sometimes seemed as though John Henry had settled in Suffolk simply to disoblige his neighbors."

Cotton Hall is half rectory, half manor, and settled into as home by cotton merchant John Henry Braithwaite. It was he who gave it the simple name, as though, while proud of his newfound affluence, he wasn't going to hide where that affluence came from. Every summer the prospering family of John Henry come as visitors to Cotton Hall, and every summer brings changes--shattered romantic dreams, daring misalliances, and unexpected heirs. Even the plain, dull spinster in the family has her secrets to hide. But more than the story of the Braithwaite family, (the chronicle spans several decades) 'Summer Visits' is about the archetypal English country home, and the changes wrought upon it through the tumultuous last century.