The Feast

A shorter version of the novel first ran in a 1949 issue of Ladies Home Journal under the title Never Look Back. It opens with a Cornish cliff collapsing onto a seaside hotel and burying nearly everyone inside, while a few guests who happened to be out on a picnic escape. The rest of the story explores why some were spared and others were not.

The Feast, Margaret Kennedy's ninth novel, was first published in 1950 and is often considered among her most inventive works. The idea grew from a 1937 conversation among literary friends about a medieval masque of the Seven Deadly Sins. Their plan for an anthology in which seven writers each reimagined one Sin fell apart, but Kennedy kept the concept and built a new story around it. She placed all the Sins under one roof, in a Cornish hotel run by the miserable wife of Sloth.

The cast is large and varied, including a clergyman, a group of teenagers and children, several pairs of lovers, and a number of unhappy married couples. Kennedy uses them in a dark, witty moral fable that tests the Biblical saying that many are called but few are chosen.