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
Thomas Mayne Reid to teach school. In December 1839 he boarded the "Dumfriesshire" bound for New Orleans, Louisiana, arriving in January 1840. Shortly afterward he found a job as a clerk for a corn factor, or trader in the corn market. He stayed in New Orleans for six months. It is said that he left his position for refusing to whip slaves. (Reid later used Louisiana as the setting of one of his best-selling books, an anti-slavery novel entitled "The Quadroon".) From New Orleans, Reid traveled to Tennessee. On a plantation near Nashville, he tutored the children of Dr. Peyton Robertson, who some