Warwick, a best-selling novelist in both Europe and America in the 1920s and 1930s, became a household name in the years following the publication of Sorrell and Son. His bestseller Doomsday begins: Someone had asked Mary Viner as a child why she so disliked going to school, and had received the pregnant reply: 'Cos one does the same thing every day; and at the age of three-and-twenty Mary was still resenting repetition. Only more so, because life had become more busily full of it, a circus of dreary tidyings and cleanlinesses, of washings up and washings down, of moments that smelt of yellow soap, and tea leaves and paraffin.