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Laura Maffey Laura Maffey, a British national of Italian origin and a member of the Fabian Society, has been doing research on Sigmund Freud’s metaphysics for quite a few years without failing, in spite of the present outwards-expanding environment, to look after her house and garden...and her husband. In the past she pursued interests as diverse as interior decoration and the voicing of educational programmes for publishing houses and literary commentaries for broadcasting stations, including the Radio of the Daily American. After completing the Open University Mathematics Course (and passing the exams) she read Health and Social Care and Psychology, but decided not to work for any qualifications in the belief that any formal training puts orthodoxy before learning, hindering the individual from his cultural development.

	Works by Laura Maffey

New Grub Street by George Robert Gissing Introduced and Edited by Laura Maffey The milieu of the poor writer, admirably sketched in the eighteenth century by the satirist Tobias Smollet, relives more than a hundred years later in George Gissing’s fiction. Another place, another time…and yet his masterly work resembles a media scenario of our own day, with the same contrast between the idealist and the pushy, the romantic and the cynic, the generous and the selfish, the thoughtful and the flippant, the stylist and the pedantic. Yes, its players seem to anticipate the main ingredients of the present literary world, from the brutality of the market to the hardship of intellectual life to the poverty of mass taste to such controversial issues as women’s rights. No wonder George Orwell regarded Gissing as one of the most fascinating Victorian novelists and New Grub Street as one of most poignant novels in the history of English literature.

Flowering Wilderness by John Galsworthy Introduced and Edited by Laura Maffey Everybody is a conformist of some conformity, and so were the English upper class in the thirties as the winds of change challenged the dogmas of the Empire. A story of individual emotional struggle within the impositions of society towards the end of the Forsyte saga. A plot of love and conflict revolving around a Great War veteran and poet, his adoring fiancée, and a bigoted dandy: the unconventional Wilfrid Desert, the son of a lord, a loner who renounced Christianity for Islam when Arab fanatics threatened him at pistol point; the charming Dinny Cherrell, a patrician girl who loved him and was prepared to defy her world’s moral code for him; and the elegant horse breeder Jack Muskham, a formalist sticker who used all plausible means to ostracise him for bringing the country into disrepute.