On Growing Up Tough

Taylor Caldwell's novels have sold in the millions. She is one of the world's most widely read writers, yet during her long career she has remained a very private person.

Now she looks with disarming candor at her own life and at the early years in England and America when she was "growing up tough."

Here was no idyllic childhood. She is under no illusions about her parents, especially the strong-minded little mother who insisted that young Janet, as she was christened, could do the work of any able-bodied boy. "In fact," she muses wryly, "my parents probably invented Women's Liberation." thus forcing her into a fierce self-reliance which never allowed her to play "the big female con game" of a pampered, protected housewife.