Critical Reputation
Holding was much admired during her day. Raymond Chandler, one of the top writers of detective fiction during its golden age of 1920–1940, said of Holding that she was “the top suspense writer of them all.”
Literary critic Anthony Boucher wrote: “For subtlety, realistic conviction, incredible economy, she’s in a class by herself.” . Boucher also praised Holding's Miss Kelly as "one of those too-rare juvenile fantasies with delightful appeal to the adult connoisseur."
Holding's novel The Blank Wall (1947) was so popular in its day that it was made into a movie titled The Reckless Moment in 1949. In 2001 it was made into the movie The Deep End starring Tilda Swinton. The novel was republished by Persephone Books in 2003 and reprinted in 2009. A number of Holding’s books have also been brought back into reprint by Stark House Press and made available to a new group of readers.
Read more about this topic: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Life
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reputation:
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“The reputation of a man is like his shadow; it sometimes follows and sometimes precedes him, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter than his natural size.”
—French Proverb. Quoted in Dictionary of Similes, ed. Frank J. Wilstach (1916)