A Fine Country by Elizabeth Troop (1969)

 Another neglected fine modern woman writer. I'm guessing the reason in this instance is her interest in the negative. She has an edgy sourness. It's a voice which bristles and indicates a steely glare. This is the story of Sylvia Cass, who has had a tough life, growing up poor and ramshackle through the war with an emotionally difficult single mother, and then a rough-and-tumble bohemian existence, tinged with frustration and melancholy, since. As a child she was a bit of an intelligent outsider, and the trope has continued since; she lives a somewhat separated life in her own world, sometimes getting others more than they do themselves, sometimes hopelessly behind the eight ball about them. In the now of the novel, she has worked her way up to a 'respectable' existence with husband George and two children, but the faultlines are starting to appear in mental instability and slightly wild behaviour. Of course I wonder how much of Sylvia is Troop herself. The current action (from which standpoint a lot of her history is surveyed) is her voluntary stay in a mental home to see if her condition can be divined more acutely. It is not her first stay there, which gives scope for Troop to essay her knowing spitty comments on staff, programmes and the like. She has developed a fascination for Rosa Luxemburg, finding presumably a fellow-feeling for firebrands and victims. The experimental style of this novel lends itself to some intermingling of Sylvia-and-Rosa as a conglomerate identity, though this might have been made more of. Troop's career grew modestly into the 70s and 80s until her early-ish death, and is now completely eclipsed. The "previous works" sections in her later novels do not mention this one, so she must have disavowed it at some point before her second novel, much later in 1976, with a different publisher. All I can say is that this one makes me want to read more.