A very great profession, first published in 1983, looks at women like Katherine in Virginia Woolf's Night and Day ('Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition... She lived at home') and Laura, the heroine of Brief Encounter, women whose lives and habits were wonderfully recorded in the fiction of the time. Drawing on the novels to illuminate themes such as domestic life, romantic love, sex, psychoanalysis, the Great War and 'surplus' women, A Very Great Profession uses the work of numerous women writers to present a portrait, through their fiction, of middle-class Englishwomen in the period between the wars.