I also told myself that there were few things I would not do to get a chance at the big things of life.

We have got to ‘make two ends meet’ instead, perhaps spend fifty years at it – and fail at the last. How easy to be good on a few thousands a year! How difficult on a hundred or so! Oh, the daily grinding sordid things that threaten to make us sordid too! We may manage, a few of us, to afford a heart we know we cannot afford a soul.

Maybe unnamed? They have lived oppressed lives with an uncle who, when he dies, leaves them with a fair chunk of money but not enough to live on forever. The long and the short of it is that there are three unmarried sisters, the Miss Smiths – Kit, Doll, and the narrator whose name I can’t find. The first section of the book tries to get the reader comfortable in what’s going on, and I’ll admit I had to re-read bits of it several times. I love a slightly ridiculous premise, particularly if it involves convoluted lying and disguise, and that’s what The Indignant Spinsters provides in spades. I figured I couldn’t help but love an author who would write a book with a title like that. The reason I got interested in Boggs in the first place was The Indignant Spinsters (1921). But it wasn’t the first of her books that I read. Sally is a spirited heroine, who is determined to settle into a comfortable life now that she is in her early thirties.Last year, Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs was one of my favourite reads, and I’ve made no secret about the fact that I’d love it to be a British Library Women Writers title at some point. This entertaining novel is full of acute and humorous observations of male and female attitudes to love and marriage. Sally aims to win but is distracted by her unsettling emotions for a soldier tortured by his experience at the Front.

These two ladies form a quiet alliance, recognising that the prize isn’t really worth fighting over but respecting the other’s pursuit of financial security. With some encouragement from the local busybody, she makes a play for Mr Bingley, the bank manager, although she has a rival in Mrs Dalton, a widow with a young daughter to raise. When her bohemian life in Paris falls flat at the beginning of the First World War, Sally Lunton returns to the care of her guardian in Little Crampton to find a husband. Sally on the Rocks is part of a curated collection of forgotten works by early to mid-century women writers, featuring the best middlebrow fiction from the 1910s to the 1960s, which offer escapism, popular appeal and plenty of period detail to amuse, surprise and inform.