A Woman of Integrity

Finding herself to be on the wrong side of fifty for a female film star, Laura Scott’s career is on the slide. She has an opportunity to reverse this downward spiral when she is offered the starring role in a one-woman play about the life and loves of Hollywood silent screen actress turned pioneering pilot, Georgie Hepburn. Laura jumps at the chance for Georgie is someone she has admired for her courage and integrity ever since she was a child. But as Laura discovers more about Georgie, she realises there is always a price to pay for integrity – in her own life as well as Georgie’s.Acclaimed author J David Simons’ fifth novel, this is a subtle and complex exploration of a creative life and the challenges faced when a person’s desire to be authentic comes under pressure.

Reviews of A Woman of Integrity

A beautiful novel about one woman's obsession with the life of a silent movie star as she struggles to accept life's compromises. Finding herself to be on the wrong side of fifty for a female film star, Laura Scott's career is on the slide. She has an opportunity to reverse this downward spiral when she is offered the starring role in a one-woman play about the life and loves of Hollywood silent screen actress turned pioneering pilot, Georgie Hepburn. Laura jumps at the chance for Georgie is someone she has admired for her courage and integrity ever since she was a child. But as Laura discovers more about Georgie, she realises there is always a price to pay for integrity – in her own life as well as Georgie's.Acclaimed author J David Simons' fifth novel, this is a subtle and complex exploration of a creative life and the challenges faced when a person's desire to be authentic comes under pressure. J David Simons is a former lawyer, lecturer, cotton farmer and journalist. He is the author of five novels including An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful and The Credit Draper which was short-listed for the McKitterick Prize. `A Woman of Integrity is an impressive read from an experienced pen. Beautifully textured Simons' elegiac prose is written with an admirable confidence' Lisa O'Donnell, winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize, author of The Death of Bees and Closed Doors; `A Woman of integrity introduces us to Laura, an actor no longer in the limelight. As Laura's life unravels, a parallel story comes alive through the memoirs of the feisty reclusive silent film star-turned-photographer, Georgie Hepburn, now deceased. As Laura finds out more about Georgie, her life begins to change. A wonderfully readable, well-researched and at times humorous exploration of two women's lives, loves and experiences in the 20th and 21st centuries.' Lisa Ballantyne, author of The Guilty One and Redemption Road; `Laura Scott and Georgina Hepburn are surely real people – so brightly do their passions and complexities burn. From Highgate to Hollywood, and across generations, J David Simons makes troubled, fascinating women speak to each other, and us, about ageing, flawed idols, movies, and theatreland in a rollicking, cleverly connected and thoroughly satisfying plot. Like Nancy Mitford and Helen Fielding got together and wrote a postmodern comedy of manners together – with a captivating historical backstory and stardust thrown in. J David Simons is hilarious and insightful.' Rachel Holmes, author of Eleanor Marx: A Life and co-editor of Fifty Shades of Feminism