A collection of Wikipedia articles, edited, reformatted and with additions. In chronological order. References and sections on non-literary activity are sometimes omitted, hopefully not to the point of misrepresenting the author, which might include feminist or political activism. To my surprise the biographical material on Wikipedia was sometimes mesmerising, although it was uneven. Where there were gaps I have tried to fill them from other sources. Refer back to the wikipedia articles for more context and references in some cases, and if you have a verified source of information please update the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is published under a creative commons licence. So this compilation also carries a creative commons licence.

Introduction

Looking through Sarah Richardson's ‘Writing on the Line’ (1996) I was struck by how many of the working class women writers were from North America and how many more were poets. Howard Slater had made a list of British working class male novelists and I selected British woman writers from ‘Writing on the Line’ and found that most of them now have Wikipedia pages - I first made a list of links. Wanting to take this further I first looked to focus on novels and short story writers but this category started to break up as many writers wrote in many idioms producing fact, fiction, poetry, plays, screenwriting and journalism. I decided on an arbitrary cut-off point of writers born before 1962.

When I first made the list I was thinking how few working class women novelists had been published in this period. But then the lists of books by each author started to stack up … and there’s plenty to read and much that I missed even really hearing about. Of course it focuses on the most successful - others who produced a community published autobiography or self-published novel, did not get a Wikipedia page, and they should really be included - every life counts. Others only published an autobiography, perhaps in the last years of life, but were extraordinary writers and people.

We could also discuss discuss the genre snobbery in literary circles that puts crime, young peoples literature, romantic and fantasy fiction, and perhaps historical based narratives, in a lower category than the novel.