Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) was a novelist, essayist, critic and political campaigner on many fronts, including gay equality, pacifism and animal rights. Her many novels include Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953), The Finishing Touch (1963) and The Snow Ball (1964). Along with her husband, the art historian Michael Levy, and lover, Maureen Duffy, she campaigned to set up the Public Lending Right (PLR), so authors receive payment every time their book is borrowed from a public library.
Her many non-fiction works include The Rights of Animals (1969), Beardsley and His World (1976) and Baroque ‘n’ Roll and Other Essays (1987).
Brigid Brophy
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay(1903-1988) was born in Mangalore, India, and was a social reformer, author and central figure in the inter-war Indian feminist movement. In 1927, she co-founded the All-India Women’s Conference, which was dedicated to the welfare and empowerment of women and women’s rights. She raised important questions around child marriage and women’s literacy.
Kamaldevi joined the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, and became its president in 1936. She believed strongly in the relationship between cultural and economic autonomy. Kamaladevi’s greatest legacy was the revival of Indian handicrafts, handlooms, and theatre in independent India.
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
James Courage (1903-1963) was born in the Canterbury region of New Zealand, and moved to England in 1922, at the age of eighteen, to attend the University of Oxford. He remained in England for the rest of his life, returning to New Zealand only once in the early 1930s, although several of his novels are set in the city of Christchurch and its rural surroundings.
Courage had a prolific writing career. He wrote several plays, numerous short stories and poems and eight novels that were published by the leading literary publishers of his day: One House (1933), The Fifth Child (1948), Desire Without Content (1950), Fires in the Distance (1952), The Young Have Secrets (1954), The Call Home (1956), A Way of Love (1959) and The Visit to Penmorten (1961). A Way of Love, originally published by Jonathan Cape, was Courage’s bravest depiction of gay existence. Lurid’s new edition is the first since its original publication; all of Courage’s other novels remain out of print. The James Courage Diaries, an edited collection of Courage’s diaries written between 1920-63, was published in 2021.
James Courage
Mary Louisa Gordon (1861-1941) lived a pioneering late nineteenth century feminist life. Part of the first generation of doctors to be trained at the London School of Medicine for Women, she became a prison inspector in 1908, the first ever woman to do so.
Always sympathetic to feminist causes, her work with women prisoners informed her second book Penal Discipline (1922), which advocated for prison reform. Chase of the Wild Goose (1936) is inspired, in part, by Gordon’s experience of studying analytical psychology with Carl and Emma Jung.
Mary Gordon
David Rees (1936-1993) was the author of over thirty works, the majority being young adult novels. He was also part of the burgeoning gay journalism scene of the late 1970s, and regularly wrote reviews and articles for magazines and newspapers, including Gay News and Gay Times. In the late 1960s Rees moved to Exeter. Many of his stories are set in Devon and Cornwall, including his Carnegie Medal winning historical fiction, The Exeter Blitz (1978). Between 1968-1984 he worked as a Lecturer in Education at the University of Exeter, and the educational dimension of young adult fiction inspired his writing, especially themes of identity and sexuality. Quintin’s Man (1976) and In the Tent (1979) featured gay protagonists but The Milkman’s on His Way (1982) was his boldest attempt to foreground the experience of gay teenagers in his stories.
Other novels like The Hunger (1986), a gay historical romance set during the 1840 Great Famine, were inspired by Rees’ Irish family background. From 1985 David Rees was living with AIDS, an experience explored in his adult novel The Wrong Apple (1987). He continued to write until his death in 1993 from AIDS-related illness.
David Rees
Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1937-2023) was born in Croydon, South London. Despite studying art and sculpture, Villa-Gilbert wanted to be a writer. Her first novel Mrs Galbraith’s Air was published by Chatto and Windus in 1963. She published five other novels with the publisher over the next decade, My Love All Dressed in White (1964), and Mrs Cantello (1966), A Jingle-Jangle Song (1968), The Others (1970) and Manuela: A Modern Myth (1973). A short story collection, The Sun in Hours – the final published work in her lifetime – came in 1986.
In the 1990s Villa-Gilbert moved to Cornwall and retreated from public view. She continued to write, however, and her literary papers – recently acquired by Special Collections at the University of Exeter – contain many unpublished manuscripts.
Mariana Villa-Gilbert
