Jane Oliver & Ann Stafford

[from back of 2020 Handheld Press edition]

Business As Usual is a delightful illustrated novel in letters from 1933. It tells the story of Hilary Fane, an Edinburgh girl fresh out of university who is determined to support herself by her own earnings in London for a year, despite the resentment of her surgeon fiancé. After a nervous beginning looking for a job while her savings shrink, she finds work as a typist in the London department store of Everyman's (a very thin disguise for Selfridges). Through luck and an inability to type well she rises rapidly through the ranks to work in the library, where she has to enforce modernising systems on her entrenched and frosty colleagues.

Business As Usual is charming, intelligent, heart-warming, funny, and entertaining. It's also deeply interesting as a record of the history of shopping in the 1930s, and for its clear-eyed descriptions of social conditions, poverty and illegitimacy.