The L-Shaped Room (novel) The L-Shaped Room (novel) The L-Shaped Room is a 1960 British novel by Lynne Reid Banks which tells the story of a young woman, unmarried and pregnant, who moves into a London boarding house, befriending a young man in the building. It was adapted into a film by Bryan Forbes with significant differences from the novel. "The L-Shaped Room" is set in the late 1950s and follows a young woman, Jane Graham, who arrives alone at a run-down boarding house in London after being turned out of her comfortable middle class home by her shocked father after telling him she
Lynne Reid Banks and a sequel about Charlotte Brontë, "Path to the Silent Country". Banks was born in London, the only child of James and Muriel Reid Banks. She was evacuated to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, during World War II and returned after the war was over. She attended St Teresa's School Effingham in Surrey. Prior to becoming a writer, Banks was an actress, and also worked as a television journalist in Britain, one of the first women to do so. In 1962 Banks emigrated to Israel, where she taught for eight years on an Israeli kibbutz Yas'ur. In 1965 she married Chaim Stephenson