She didn't want men to be in love with her. She wanted power and a dangerous gamble and the fun of winning and putting herself over as a sweet saviour, till at last she came to believe it herself.

Lorna Blake is a woman able to create her own reality a pathological liar, narcissist conman, and devoted single mother to two daughters, Jay and Molly. When her eldest needs lifesaving treatment that they cannot afford, Lorna takes up the risky but thrilling activity of taking her young daughters to the halls of wealthy strangers to beg, with tales of husbands dead, deserted, and insane. But as her daughters grow up struggling to differentiate between fact and fiction, it ultimately becomes harder for them to cleave themselves from their mother's web of lies and justifications.

Acted out in the hallways of London mansions and across several continents, The Woman in the Hall is part psychological drama, part cat-and-mouse chase, as well as a darkly comic portrait of how the figure of a single mother could wring pity from 1930s society.

G. B. Stern (18901973) was a prolific writer best known in her lifetime for her series The Matriarch: a lightly autobiographical saga of two cosmopolitan Jewish families, struggling through the aftermath of the 1928 financial crash. She was also a playwright and saw several of her books adapted onto screen, including The Woman in the Hall in 1947.