Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  I wrote a substantial part of this book while I was one of the writers in residence at the Château de Lavigny in Switzerland, run by the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation, and I would like to thank the Committee for their hospitality. I am grateful to all the other writers who were there with me for their good company.

  This book would not have been possible without the women behind Miss Webster, who are Miss Joyce Caiger-Smith, Miss Rachel Cary Field, Miss Kathleen Cusack, Miss Persis Freer, Miss Barbara Wetherall, and Violet D’Oyen Fitchett, known as Miss Vi.

  A Note on the Author

  Patricia Duncker is the author of the novels Hallucinating Foucault (winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize), The Deadly Space Between, and James Miranda Barry, as well as collections of short stories and essays. Her work has been shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.

  By the Same Author

  Fiction

  Hallucinating Foucault

  Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees

  James Miranda Barry

  The Deadly Space Between

  Seven Tales of Sex and Death

  The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge

  Criticism

  Sisters and Strangers

  Writing on the Wall: Selected Essays

  Edited

  In and Out of Time

  Cancer through the Eyes of Ten Women

  (with Vicky Wilson)

  The Woman who Loved Cucumbers

  (with Janet Thomas)

  Mirror, Mirror (with Janet Thomas)

  First published in Great Britain in 2006

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 2006 by Patricia Duncker

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc,

  36 Soho Square,

  London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ‘The Way that it Shows’ by Richard Thompson. Published by Beeswing Music.

  Admin by Bug Music. Used by permission.

  ISBN 9781408822555

  www.bloomsbury.com/patriciaduncker

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