Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared

I am currently reading a book by Christopher Fowler called Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared.Number 27 is Barbara Pym, and I am in a huff on her behalf. She is not forgotten. However, he also includes Dickens and R.L. Stevenson for their their lesser known works.

A quote of Barbara Pym's captures the imagination:

Only two years after her rediscovery, she succumbed to a recurrence of breast cancer. She said 'The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things. The trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems, especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard."

The book does not have a generalizable theory for why some authors, very popular in their day, fade from the public eye.  Instead, it tells individual, short bios of the authors.  The authors are all novelists, no non-fiction.

Warning: you will find A LOT more books you wish to read, and for those of us with tottering towers on the nightstand, and books stacked on the stairs, and very full backpacks, this may not be good news.