Kathleen Dayus and Working-Class Women's Writing

the long version

Another one of Lester's series of essays on British working-class writers, which have appeared in Protean Publications as well as in the London Magazine when under the editorship of Alan Ross. Here Lester gives particular attention to the problems encountered by working-class women writers. He focusses in on the example of Kathleen Dayus, grown up in overcrowded slums of Edwardian Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter, whose opportunity to write was deferred till retired from family and work contraints. This resulted in an extraordinary Indian Summer of a career in writing, her first book published in her eighteeth year, and by the time she died, just a few days short of her hundredth birthday, she had published six more and become something of a national celebrity.