The Backward Shadow was published by Chatto & Windus in 1970, the second of Banks’s Jane Graham trilogy. The novel picks up after The L-Shaped Room — Jane has had her baby (David) and left the Fulham bedsit. She retreats to a cottage in the countryside, where she and her friend Dottie establish a craft shop selling handmade goods.
The “backward shadow” of the title is the past — specifically, the shadow cast by Jane’s choices over her present life. As a single mother in 1960s rural England, she faces practical difficulties (money, childcare, social disapproval) and emotional ones (loneliness, the desire for partnership that conflicts with her hard-won independence). The man from the first novel — Toby, the writer — reappears, and the question of whether they can build a relationship is complicated by everything that has happened since.
Banks writes about single motherhood with a specificity that was unusual in 1970: the exhaustion, the isolation, the way a child simultaneously gives life meaning and removes the freedom to pursue it. Jane’s struggle is not dramatic (no villains, no crises) but accumulative — the slow wearing-down of daily life without help, without money, and without the social infrastructure that married mothers could access.
The novel is less acclaimed than its predecessor but more realistic: where The L-Shaped Room had the intensity of crisis, The Backward Shadow has the difficult truth of aftermath — the long, undramatic work of building a life from limited materials.
Collecting The Backward Shadow
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1970): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- US first (Simon & Schuster, 1970): $8–$20