Good literature, people agree, is long-lasting. It rides out fads and fashions so that years, decades, even centuries on, it still speaks truths to us.

And I don’t just mean those huge universal themes to be found in Shakespeare – the perils of excessive ambition or jealousy or pride – the fatal flaws of the tragic hero.

What I am talking about is the delight that can be felt when a character’s emotions strike such a familiar chord that you long to meet said protagonist for a coffee and chat over matters heart to heart.

I have just finished reading Dorothy Whipple’s novel They Knew Mr Knight, published in 1934. I have only discovered this novelist, reissued and published by Persephone Books, in recent years and have loved every title of hers that I have so far read. Whipple may be writing about characters and lives lived in the first half of the 20th century, but their depiction is utterly relatable and true.

She wrote what is often described – somewhat disparagingly, I feel – as domestic fiction and no doubt fell into obscurity for a while partly for that reason. There are no modernist tricks in her writing. Instead, she provides her readers with a straight-forward narration about people attempting to live ordinary and peaceful lives who come into conflict with some antagonist or other that threatens the stability of a contented existence.

I found myself, while reading They Knew Mr Knight, constantly saying out loud, Yes! Exactly! That’s just how it is! How life is!

Take this passage about Ruth, a young woman who is attempting to write a novel:

She took up her pen and bowed herself over the exercise book. Nobody knew what hard work it was to write a novel. Over and over again, she quailed before the task. If she could feel it was good, she could have done it easily, she thought. But the gap between what she wanted to say and what she said seemed to be unbridgeable. The struggle was endless. She despaired every night, but every morning, she hoped again.

Exactly! Every writer surely can identify with this!

Then there is Whipple’s understanding of motherhood.

Celia, the mother of a son and two daughters in the novel, expresses feelings about her children that are immediately identifiable. When her oldest child, Douglas, is away at university we are told that:

His intention was good. He meant to console her, but he made her sad. He would come to visit her now and then, but their life together was really coming to an end. What a short time you have your children, Celia thought, with sudden pain.

The novel might be set over 90 years ago, but the emotion is every present.

And how many mothers of adult children can identify with the following, when Douglas has had his heart broken by his first love and returns to the family home, unhappy yet unreachable?

Dismissed, Celia went away. She stood about the house, waiting for some sign from his bedroom. How much easier it was, she thought, when they were little. She had to be so cautious with them now. She spent a miserable afternoon by herself in the drawing room, worrying about him, wondering if he was cold or hungry and not daring to go and ask. Oh why must they grow up and get these troubles they wouldn’t let you help with?

There is a sense of dramatic irony somehow with reading so many novels – as I tend to do these days – set in the earlier years of the 20th century and I find myself worrying about what will happen to the characters during the First or Second World Wars. Hindsight means there’s an inevitable awareness of what came next of which the protagonists on the final pages of the novel remain ignorant. Who survived, who perished?

And it proves the strength of the authors’ skills, their ability to create a wholly believable cast of characters, that my imagination takes me to such thoughts.

So I am championing the so-called ‘domestic’ novel!

It seems to me such novels are important for their ability to portray those ‘ordinary’ lives that many us can identify with – finding consolation and comfort in seeing our anxieties and feelings experienced by protagonists across the decades. Our lives might be entirely contrary in a material sense to those of close on a hundred years ago, but our core concerns and values can be very close.

I just wish I could ring up Celia Blake from They Knew Mr Knight or better still, pop round to see her and have a companionable chat, woman to woman, over a pot of tea or glass of wine!