Sparrows

Mavis Keeves, a dead colonel's daughter with a good education and no money, goes up to London to earn her own living, and the city takes its percentage at every stage. Newte wrote about the women the city used up — shop girls, typists, servants, the unprotected of his own subtitle — and this 1909 novel sold enormously and was attacked for what it showed. Nobody is rescued in it by a legacy. Fifty-one plates of painting from 1750 to 1925, among them Munch and Rothenstein, gather the harvests, farm labour and hard-won portraits that echo Mavis's unprotected passage through a city that takes its percentage.