But her agent would have sent the MS out to several editors at one go. If PRH hadn't bought it, it's perfectly possible someone else would have. SW doesn't say there was an auction (ie multiple publishers all wanting to publish it), but then she wouldn't -- it would risk making her look successful or sought-after, or like something other than the eternal bumbling, steadfast underdog image she's so stuck on. There may have been several publishers interested.
That scene in TWS where she goes in to meet the PRH team always irritates me wildly.
Everything from the 'country mouse pining for wild winds and nature on the Strand' pose to continual references to the looks and elegance of 'the literary agent' (why not 'MY' literary agent? And why not use her name?) and the editor, to focus on 'the glass and steel building', the glass door, the 'stale office air'.
I mean, what would she have preferred, for Penguin to have its headquarters in a daub-and-wattle hut on Dartmoor?
I can absolutely understand her being slightly nervous (you don't meet a commissioning editor who wants to buy your book every day, and she was off her usual terrain), but she is simply misrepresenting the situation by pretending this is like some kind of job interview or viva that she may yet fail:
If I blew the meeting, as I expected to, and Penguin decided they didn’t want to publish my book, then what would I have lost?
If you and your agent are at the point of meeting an editor, there's nothing to blow! They want to publish your book! They're not auditioning you against a bunch of other writers or giving you marks out of ten like a Strictly judge! And her agent would have told her this.
But she's addicted to representing herself as the poor little underdog, so she glumwashes even the triumphant moment of selling her first book by focusing on everyone else being small and elegant, by remembering the courtroom on the day they lost their house, and all the books they apparently lost in the eviction, and on the fact that, according to her, the first thing her future editor says to her is 'We need to change that title'.
Similarly, she undercuts the joy of getting her first copies of TSP by waiting to open the box until after a struggling TW arrives home full of woe about his studies and a 'huge weight' apparently pushing down on his neck.
(And then she does exactly the same thing with TW getting his degree results, where he is apparently unaware of the mechanism by which he gets his results, and, despite apparently being in touch with his classmates (if his phone keeps buzzing with texts from his classmates celebrating their results, what was stopping him asking them how they'd found out?), just hanging about thinking he's failed, and then taking a phonecall from his tutor:
He turned the phone on to speaker, pale and still. Years of work waiting for an outcome.
Which again is bollocks. Even if his degree had final exams, he will have known exactly how he was doing all along via continual assessment, projectwork, tutor feedback etc. No one does 'years of work waiting for an outcome' with absolutely no idea whether they will pass or fail.)
But clearly it would have been against the plucky underdog brand for her simply to be excited and happy her book was being published, or for TW to be reasonably confident he'd passed his degree, or even to ask his classmates how they found out their results.