It was indeed very difficult for the Laventie children not to be a little priggish.

Ann Laventie, the youngest of three children in a long line of anti-social Sussex gentry, doesn't quite fit the mould of her intellectual, elegant, ultra-modern siblings Dick, an artist, and Elizabeth, a high-brow writer. Their father is scholarly and just wealthy enough to focus all his attention on reading and other highbrow pursuits. Ann, on the other hand, worries about being plump, is what might be called a 'people person, ' and appreciates the simpler pleasures. As the young Laventies spend more and more of their time in the glitter of London, their differences grow more pronounced, and when Ann returns home with an unsuitably ordinary fiancé, this dazzling, witty battle of the brows reaches its exhilarating climax.

Rhododendron Pie, one of Margery Sharp's rarest and most sought-after novels, was her debut, reportedly written in one month while Sharp worked as a typist and shared a flat in Paddington with two other girls. But it already shows all the charm, humour, and sophistication that characterizes Sharp's beloved later work. First published in 1930, it has, inexplicably, never been reprinted. Until now. This new edition features an introduction by twentieth-century women's historian Elizabeth Crawford.

'A first novel of quite unusual charm, pointedly and gracefully written, and whimsically human' Yorkshire Post

Margery Sharp was born Clara Margery Melita Sharp in 1905 in Wiltshire. She spent some of her childhood in Malta, and on the family's return to England became a pupil at Streatham Hill High School. She later studied at Bedford College, London, where she claimed her time was devoted 'almost entirely to journalism and campus activities.' Still living in London, she began her writing career at the age of twenty-one, becoming a contributor of fiction and non-fiction to many of the most notable periodicals of the time in both Britain and America. In 1938 she married Major Geoffrey Castle, an aeronautical engineer. On the outbreak of World War II, she served as a busy Army Education Lecturer, but continued her own writing both during and long after the conflict. Many of her stories for adults became the basis for Hollywood movie screenplays, in addition to the 'Miss Bianca' children's series, animated by Disney as The Rescuers in 1977. Margery Sharp ultimately wrote 22 novels for adults (not 26, as is sometimes reported), as well as numerous stories and novellas (many of them published only in periodicals) and various works for children. She died in Suffolk in 1991, one year after her husband.