WILLA MUIR, THE USURPERS

Finally in print! The Usurpers was ready for publication in 1952, but it has never been published until now. The typescript has been held in the Special Collection of the Library of the University of St Andrews along with the diaries, journal and other manuscripts of Willa Muir. This is a publishing event of major importance, a political and satirical novel dealing with the years leading up to the Communist takeover of power in Prague in 1948. Willa and Edwin Muir lived in Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1948 and both of them explored the impact of those tense and increasingly difficult times, Edwin in his poems and autobiography, Willa in The Usurpers and in her memoirs, Belonging.