Hilda Stewart Reid

Hilda Reid took her undergraduate degree at Somerville College Oxford, where she was a member of a close-knit group of friends, several of whom went on to have distinguished literary careers.

In her autobiography Testament of Youth Vera Brittain describes how Winifred Holtby introduced her to "her friend Hilda Reid, the pale, whimiscal second-year student who has since become, as H.S.Reid, the author of exquisite historical novels, delicately etched with the fine pen of a literary drypoint artist".

[1] In her review of Hilda Reid's first novel in Time and Tide, Vera Brittain wrote: "To the generation that went down from Oxford just seven years ago, Miss H.S.Reid was known as an ardent and fastidious historical scholar, blissfully indifferent to the anxieties and rivalries of an examination system which offers little scope to an imagination so fine and so constructive."

[2] In her review of Emily in The Schoolmistress, Winifred Holtby wrote: "Her two earlier books, Phillida and Two Soldiers and a Lady, were subtle and scholarly stories of the period after the Civil Wars.

But this year when she published Phillida, an exquisite study of the seventeenth century – gay with polished wit and musical phrases, concrete and authentic and vividly imagined, those few who had read the uncommon promise of her frugal essays said 'I told you so.

[6] The reviewer in Country Life wrote: "Though this seems to be Miss Reid's first novel, its strange elements are maturely compounded and her use of the seventeenth century idiom is natural and graceful".

[8] The reviewer in the New York Herald Tribune wrote: "In this story, written in a style whose beauty is a certain crystal clarity and appositeness of phrase, a subtle transparence of word in which the underlying thought continually vitalises the changing external picture, the author has achieved an historical novel of peculiar charm and merit.

"[12] The reviewer in the Manchester Guardian wrote: "A graceful style and an intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century England are the outstanding features of Miss Reid's novel".

The cranks, the nut-eaters, the uplifters, the earnest remakers of post-war Europe are paraded in company with the most comic little group of Balkan intriguers London has ever sheltered".

"[16] The Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote: "Miss Reid has taken a holiday from the seventeenth century, and her new book is a modern extravaganza, very wittily performed".

[17] The reviewer in John O'London's Weekly wrote: "Miss H.S.Reid, whose amusing novel Emily has just appeared, went to Somerville College, Oxford, after first studying art.

[20] The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement wrote: "It is a shrewd piece of work, gracefully carried out, and one takes great pleasure in the reasonable mind behind it".

[21] The reviewer in the Manchester Guardian wrote: "Miss Reid has a keen sense of the general ideas dominating English life at particular periods, and she is particularly successful with her eccentrics, such as Mr.Finch, the curate in charge in the days of pluralism, who, having conceived a boyish devotion to Marie Antoinette, holds himself partly responsible for her death because of his revolutionary opinions".