Sylvia Smith - Telegraph Sylvia Smith herself appeared to buy into this interpretation, claiming that she intended the book to be "hysterically funny." But interviewers found that a sense of irony was not one of her strong points, and concluded that her banalities were not written out of a desire to amuse, but merely reflected the fact that she had nothing to say and could not write. The Diary of a Nobody explored a pedestrian mind, but the exploring was by a writer of great intelligence. Misadventures, by contrast, was entirely authentic. Some said that the joke, in other words, was at Sylvia Smith's expense. "I was born," she recalled "in a hospital in Walthamstow six days before the end of the Second World War [May 2 1945], so my mother always reckoned I was cause for a double celebration. I grew up an only child as my elder brother, who was born the year before me, died of convulsions when he was three days old. My parents were nice, honest working people and both worked in factories. I can't remember too much about my first school, Roger Ascham Infants. I know that I learnt to read quite quickly, but I do recall being snapped at by the teacher for not writing an 'O" properly. Apparently, I didn't fill in the top and it looked like a 'U."" Things did not improve: "At the age of 10 I was put in the school play as the north wind. I had to stand with my arms above my head, waving occasionally, and I had two lines to say. My parents proudly attended the play. At the end of the evening I realised I had forgotten my lines and had said nothing throughout the entire performance. After leaving school with no qualifications aged 15, Sylvia Smith trained as a hairdresser but "got put off when I was shampooing an old lady's hair and my fingernails got caught in a growth." She then trained as a shorthand typist. Until she was in her 40s she worked mostly as a secretary or temp in banks, insurance companies and the Probation Service, moving from bedsit to bedsit, going on the occasional social club outing or group package holiday, and having the odd romance with men called Ali or Heracles ("The H is silent," she explained helpfully. "You say 'error" and join it to the surname of John Cleese the actor and you have the name 'Heracles""). Sylvia Smith explained that she had first thought of writing a book when she was 43, but did not get down to it until she had to give up work at the age of 46 due to some unspecified illness, after which she claimed sickness benefit. At the time she was living in a shabby lodging house in Walthamstow, so she started writing about the other residents in the house: Laura, Tracey, Sharon, Sharon's boyfriend Peter, and the landlords Mr and Mrs Appleby. When she had finished, she sent the manuscript to hundreds of publishers, but they all rejected it; Appleby House, a chronicle of malfunctioning boilers, bath-cleaning rotas, arguments over space on the washing line and tales of temperamental television sets, was eventually published (by Picador) in 2002 after her first book. Misadventures, too, was rejected by nearly everyone until it was taken out of the slush pile by Jeremy Lewis, the author and literary editor of the Oldie magazine, who recommended it to the literary agent Caroline Dawnay. "When I first saw the manuscript, it was a little dog-eared, written on a typewriter, but there was not a single mistake in it," she explained. The discipline of that attention to detail gave me a kind of respect for it. Caroline Dawnay spent two years touting the book round major publishing houses without success before it was accepted by the Scottish publisher Canongate. Sylvia Smith's final book, My Holidays (2004), was an account of brief holidays spent in cheap English guesthouses or on group package tours abroad, full of "colourful" markets, "historic buildings" and petty bickering with her holiday companions. "I found Rome to be a beautiful city steeped in history," ran a typically enlightening passage. The Italian people were kind and friendly towards us. The weather was warm and sunny each day of our stay. Even when a visit to New York to promote Misadventures coincides with the attacks of 9/11, Sylvia Smith merely experiences "an uneasy three days." Sylvia Smith admitted that she did not read much "apart from Hello!" , though she enjoyed shopping: "Usually, at about noon I take myself to Epping market and have a cheap lunch," she told an interviewer. I thoroughly enjoy a nice little drive. One of my hobbies is shopping. And I like to have a big breakfast in Tescos. And I like to go to charity shops. "I don't know why I wrote Misadventures," she said. I just like writing books and I wanted to get published. I thought it might be a good idea. Sylvia Smith, born May 2 1945, died February 23 2013