Lynne Reid Banks, who has died aged 94, hit a jackpot with her first book, The L-Shaped Room (1960), the story of an unmarried middle-class girl, Jane Graham, who takes a dingy room in London to hide her unwanted pregnancy. The novel was a cracking read that caught the cusp of a momentous change in social attitudes. Its profile rose even higher when it became a film in 1962, with Leslie Caron playing its heroine. It sold in its millions and never went out of print.