Lady Living Alone, by Norah Lofts

A woman too frightened to be alone comes to regret the company she keeps.

Norah Lofts (1904-1983) was a British writer who specialised in historical fiction, but wrote occasional nail biting thrillers under the pseudonym Peter Curtis. Lady Living Alone was first published in 1945 and here gets a new printing from the British Library Women Writers series. 

Penelope Shadow is temperamentally fragile, almost timid. She’s not cut out for the practicalities of life and is a bit of a dreamer. One area of her life where she’s fully competent, however, is as a novelist. After a few false starts, she begins churning out best selling fiction. The money is soon coming in. But there is one problem. A single woman, she is forced to move out of her half-sister’s house and find her own accommodation. She has the money to buy a handsome house of her own, but is terrified of being alone in it. It’s her achilles heel. To try and assuage her fears, she hires staff, women to look after the housework, but they tend to leave. 

Then Penelope meets the young Irishman, Terence Munce. He is working as a menial at a rooming house she stays at. In a rash moment she asks him to come and work for her. Everything turns out smoothly. Penelope is back to hammering away at her typewriter, while the ever attentive Terry takes care of everything. Things take an unexpected turn when Terry professes to love Penelope and the two get married. All is well in this new if surprising arrangement, until Terry starts draining Penelope’s purse of funds at a great rate of knots. Ever forgiving, she makes allowances for Terry, until secrets emerge about her husband’s life and Penelope feels her life is imperilled.

Lady Living Alone is a solidly written domestic drama about a vulnerable and too eager-to-please woman and her young, seemingly perfect but scheming husband. The tension is wonderfully sustained right up to the last page and the novel gives vivid glimpses of life in 1930s Britain (the book is set in the previous decade to which it was published). The steadily darkening plot will remind readers of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Elizabeth Von Arnim’s Vera, two novels about duplicitious, villainous husbands. 

A sturdy, page-turning thriller with valuable insights into British society in the 1930s.

Lady Living Alone, by Norah Lofts. Published by British Library Publishing. $22.99

OCT 2025