‘One of the most original, artful and elegant writers of our century. To read her for the first time is a singular experience’ - Hilary Mantel

Josephine Napier maintains order in her girls’ school through a benevolent exterior of self-sacrifice. But when a new, male teacher and a figure from her husband’s past upset her environment’s delicate equilibrium, the darker shades of her authority begin to show and a ruthless struggle for power begins.

Tense and subversively witty, More Women Than Men is a masterful unveiling of the covert allegiances and fierce conflicts produced by a claustrophobic world.

‘As much a part of our great 20th-century literary heritage as Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen… She writes wonderfully, giving her often ghastly characters mordantly witty lines worthy of Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde’ - Guardian