The world of writing

AN INVISIBLE GIANT

Gertrude Trevelyan is not exactly a household name these days but she was a literary sensation after the publication of her debut, Appius and Virginia, in 1932.

The story of a forty-year-old single woman who vows to bring up a baby orangutan Appius as a human, and increasingly depends on him to overcome her loneliness, ‘the novel was heralded by the Spectator as “exciting both in promise and achievement”, while the eminent critic Gerald Gould wrote: “So original is it that I have scruples about writing the word ‘novel’ at all.”,’ reports Alison Flood for The Guardian.

By 1940, Trevelyan had written seven more novels, until a bomb hit her Notting Hill home during the Blitz.