and a champion of outsiders, whether single women, the elderly or wartime refugees.Witty and subversive, her stories meld tradition and transgression, with secret sins and fetishes as much a feature of English life as eccentric aunts, country houses and parish churches.
Jones explores encounters with failure by nineteenth-century American writers - including Poe, Melville and Twain - whose celebrated works more often struck readers as profoundly messy, flawed and even perverse. Here, they emerge as theorists of failure who discovered ways to translate their own social insecurities into complex portrayals of a modern self.
