Miss Peabody’s Inheritance by Elizabeth Jolley

'In this powerful tale of love and loneliness, Elizabeth Jolley has woven two parallel stories into a dazzlingly original novel. Arabella Thorne, a cultured and eccentric schoolmistress, travels to Europe accompanied by a shy schoolgirl and the jealous Miss Edgely. Meanwhile, the Australian novelist Diana Hopewell answers a letter from Miss Peabody, an incompetent clerical worker living in a London suburb, and the ensuing correspondence between the two women changes Miss Peabody's life and personality dramatically.'

An Australian who wrote a lesbian romance corresponds with one of her readers, Dorothy Peabody, an unmarried fiftyish typist who lives in England with her bedridden mother.