Way Out of Berkeley Square

'I'm thirty, and I'm stuck'Arabella is on an increasingly desperate quest for freedom, from her overbearing father and her overtly absent brother. But her quest for self-actualisation ends up leading her into the orbit of a happily married man. The opening moves of their love affair are a spiky and self-conscious game of chess. Complete with rainy London streets, awful food, devastating kisses and agonising introspection, this is pure Rosemary Tonks.‘Writing like this…is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf. It catches like nothing else the smogs, the rodentine genes, the murky post-War grays, the lurking sexual violence of London’ Michael Hoffman, Poetry Foundation

Her writing captured the pungent, punchy essence of that city in the Swinging Sixties, Nobody writes about angsty women like Tonks, The Tonks character is always trapped. As proud as Lucifer, and trapped. She may be on holiday in Italy with friends, or laid up with gout, she can as little escape as a character in a play can escape the footlights and the stage, Tonks was principled and ambitious about her writing, pushing a continental decadence into the oddly shaped crannies of bleak British humor

Rosemary Tonks (1928-2014) was a colourful figure in the London literary scene during the 1960s. She published two poetry collections, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms and Iliad of Broken Sentences, and six novels, from Opium Fogs to The Halt During the Chase. Tonks wrote for the Observer, The Times, New York Review of Books, Listener, New Statesman and Encounter, and presented poetry programmes for the BBC.