Mrs Robert Henrey. Her April Days. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1963.

Included in the official canon, glossed ‘(the death of her mother)’.

Eleventh item in ‘Mrs Robert Henrey’s autobiographical sequence in chronological order’.

Reviewed Tatler, April 17 1963, p. 46; Sphere, April 20 1963, p. 30; Staffordshire Newsletter, May 31 1963, p. 16.

Her April Days ran to 217 pp. Demy 8vo (c. 75K words) price 21s. bound in black cloth boards with gilt spine titling, ten chapters with fifty-eight scene breaks. The dedication page bears a kind of epitaph attributed to Shakespeare (from the third sonnet, in fact): ‘Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee | Calls back the lovely April of her prime.’ The last page is subscribed: ‘Villers-sur-Mer, Calvados. January 1963.’The jacket front and spine were brown with fancy pink titles and the author name in white Garamond. The front flap carried the blurb, the back flap a list of previous titles. The jacket back adopted a new design incorporating a full-page puff that would be reused with variations for several years: ‘Critics all over the world’ ranked the original Madeleine trilogy ‘amongst the great books of the present century’. To date, Mrs Robert Henrey had sold ‘over half a million books—quite apart from paperback sales’. They had been translated ‘into six foreign languages’. She was ‘one of the few authors of our time with a huge and happily loyal readership’.