English writer's forgotten 'masterpiece' predicting rise of Nazis gets new lease of life [View all]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/08/rediscovered-a-young-english-novelists-warning-of-the-nazi-threat

English writer’s forgotten ‘masterpiece’ predicting rise of Nazis gets new lease of life

Crooked Cross, Sally Carson’s ‘electrifying’ 1934 novel to be republished

Vanessa Thorpe Arts and media correspondent
Sat 8 Feb 2025 00.00 EST

Sally Carson was not an oracle or a prophet, just a young woman from Dorset, born in 1901. Yet she foresaw a dark and violent future for Europe and gave voice to those fears in a 1934 novel that is now being hailed as “an electrifying masterpiece”.

Carson’s book, Crooked Cross, predicted the scale of the Nazi threat and is to be republished for the first time this spring, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. Controversial in its day, her novel had to tread a careful path to avoid the accusation that it was alarmist about the Führer’s aims. A stage adaptation was even censored, shorn of all its “Heil Hitlers”.

The novel tells the story of a German family struggling in an uncertain economy, but looking forward to the marriage of their daughter, Alexa, to a young doctor – that is, until his Jewish background jeopardises their engagement.

Taking its title from the shape of the swastika, Crooked Cross was immediately recognised as essential reading and widely praised, including in the pages of the Observer of July 1934, where Gerald Gould judged it “a very good novel” that avoids any “propagandist tendency” by letting “the story stand on its merits”. Reading the manuscript last year, the contemporary author Rachel Joyce described it as an “electrifying masterpiece”.

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(Musk is the new Orban is the new Hitler…)