num_pages: 308
description: Initially was published in a shortened form in a 1949 Ladies Home Journal magazine under the title of Never Look Back A Cornish cliff collapses on top of a seaside resort hotel squashing everybody but those lucky enough to be away on a picnic. The story tells why some were spared and some were not... The germ of the idea for The Feast - Margaret Kennedy's ninth novel and perhaps her most ingenious first published in 1950 - came to the author in 1937 when she and a social gathering of literary friends were discussing the Medieval Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins. The talk turned excitedly to the notion that a collection of stories might be fashioned from seven different authors each re-imagining one of the Sins through the medium of a modern-day character. That notion fell away but something more considerable stayed in Margaret Kennedy's mind over the next ten years and so she conceived of a story that would gather the Sins all under the roof of a Cornish seaside hotel managed by the unhappy wife of Sloth.Among The Feast's entertaining cast of characters are a clergyman a gaggle of adolescents and children a quarter of lovers and a clutch of frustrated husbands &amp; wives - all serving Kennedy's dark and witty moral fable which bears out the Biblical adage that many are called but only a very few chosen.
language: English
title: The Feast
publisher: Kaye & Ward