Author of The Family from One End Street, the first children’s book peopled entirely by working-class characters, Eve Garnett has been increasingly misunderstood since its publication in 1937. The town featured in this famous story was Lewes in Sussex (where the publisher is based), rather than some unnamed slum, and the author - often accused of patronising her characters - had strong socialist sympathies, even at one time attracted by communism.

This biography by her nephew throws further light on a complex, prickly personality, whose interest in the poor was stimulated by the 19th-century books she read as a child as well as by what she saw around her in London’s East End during the 1920s.