Rebel Writers

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a writer in Britain was a tweedy, privileged male in the mould of Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis; Oxbridge graduates with a network of contacts who shared their nostalgic aesthetics and supported by an intellectual establishment. Or possibly, an aggressive working-class man from the post-industrial north of England. Then came seven women who, whether or not they intended to, challenged the status quo and revolutionised the written word. At a time when women's fiction was entirely colonised by bodice rippers and pulp romances, these works reached the mass of women who were equally repelled by the misogynist elitism of literary fiction.

None of these writers would have called themselves feminists, but they lived, they felt, they sought, they observed the lives of other women, and they wrote it all like it was. Their impact was spontaneous, unconscious and enormous. They did not intend to become a literary movement but they did, and they made it possible for others to follow. This book explores the impact of the works of these women; Shelagh Delaney, Edna O'Brien, Lynne Reid Banks, Charlotte Bingham, Nell Dunn, Virginia Ironside and Margaret Forster. Accidental feminists, literary icons.