Maureen Duffy

Standard Name: Duffy, Maureen
Birth Name: Maureen Patricia Duffy
Pseudonym: D. M. Cayer
MD is known primarily a novelist, in which capacity much of her work blends elements from history, biography, autobiography, or science fiction. She has also produced plays, poems, and scholarly works. By the early twenty-first century her output was said to total twenty-eight prose works (fiction and non-fiction), poetry collections, and plays.
Platt, Edward. “25 Years fighting for writers’ rights”. ALCS News, No. 21, pp. 4 - 5.
4
MD writes often of primal bonds, of love and sexual desire, of the disadvantaged and marginalised, of gender identity and gender politics.
Black and white, half-length photograph of Maureen Duffy, her head slightly on one side and smiling. She wears a dark pullover with a striped shirt; her grey hair is in a page-boy cut with a fringe.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Martin Ross
Maurice Collis , biographer of her and her cousin Edith Somerville, believes that MR was bisexual in orientation, rather than a thorough lesbian like Edith.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
37
Her relationship with her cousin was written about in...
Dedications Lettice Cooper
Lettice Cooper dedicated her novel Snow and Roses to her fellow-campaigners for public lending right, Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy .
British Library Catalogue.
Family and Intimate relationships Edith Somerville
Some commentators have argued that theirs was a lesbian, sexual relationship, and some that it was not. It was the subject of the radio play One Goodnight by Maureen Duffy , broadcast by the BBC
Family and Intimate relationships Brigid Brophy
BB fell in love with her fellow novelist Maureen Duffy in summer 1967. The early stages of this affair caused emotional pain because Duffy, still living with her former partner. The relationship developed from passion...
Fictionalization Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
When most women writers of her age were forgotten, the Countess of Pembroke retained a niche in literary history as a partner in the Sidneian psalms as well as the dedicatee of the Arcadia....
Fictionalization Charlotte Charke
The Gentleman's Magazine devoted more space to CC 's book this year than to any other new work, though these included Johnson 's Dictionary and Voltaire 's History and State of Europe.
Baruth, Philip E. “Who Is Charlotte Charke?”. Introducing Charlotte Charke: Actress, Author, Enigma, edited by Philip E. Baruth, University of Illinois Press, 1998, pp. 9 - 62.
4
It...
Friends, Associates Brigid Brophy
BB , with Maureen Duffy , organised a Prop Art Exhibition in London.
Who’s Who. Adam and Charles Black, 1849.
Health Brigid Brophy
BB had a dark experience which she mentioned in print but did not full explain: a closest ally (preumably Maureen Duffy , with whom she had just broken up) became her assailant; she felt...
Intertextuality and Influence Rose Tremain
RT acknowledges the help of her fellow novelist Maureen Duffy with a poem which passes through the head of one of her characters. It opens: Love was my dancing partner till / darkness fell in...
Literary responses Lettice Cooper
LC 's friend and fellow-novelist Maureen Duffy praised this book for emotional clarity and political and psychological insight.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Occupation Ann Jellicoe
AJ had a long-standing professional relationship with the Royal Court Theatre . Around the time her play The Sport of My Mad Mother was performed at the Court, she became involved in the newly formed...
politics Brigid Brophy
BB became notorious for her politics in the sixties, an era of iconoclastic activity. She was a vegetarian, a sexual liberationist, an animal rights activist, a feminist, a writers' rights activist, a pro-pornography activist (she...
politics Lettice Cooper
She also participated in the campaign for authors' public lending right, having been a founder-member with Brigid Brophy , Maureen Duffy , and others, of Writers' Action Group .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Publishing Beryl Bainbridge
The manuscript of this book had been firmly dismissed, with negative comment on the imagery, diction, and spelling, in 1964 by BB 's then agent.
King, Brendan. Beryl Bainbridge. Bloomsbury , 2016.
259
New Authors, the brainchild of Graham Nicoll ...
Textual Production Margaret Drabble
MD 's novel The Red Queen (not the only work to bear this title) appeared in the same month that another novelist, Maureen Duffy , also published a book about a present-day woman encountering a...

Timeline

1948
This year almost 23,000 people died of tuberculosis in Britain; of the further 27,000 who died of bronchitis, 20,000 of pneumonia, and 7,000 of other respiratory infections, many no doubt had TB too.
By 1975
The popularity of autobiographies and novels like Maxine Hong Kingston 's Woman Warrior and Rita Mae Brown 's Rubyfruit Jungle had opened a large and growing reading market for coming-of-age works by women writers from...
23 April 1975
A major demonstration was held in Belgrave Square, London, in support of Public Lending Right.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada, 2010.
16
August 1979
During the annual conference at Brighton of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality , the Gay Humanist Group (GHG) was launched. It later became the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, or GALHA .
14 October 2010
Ed Vaizey , Minister for Culture in the coalition British parliament, divulged to the Society of Authors his government's intention to close the Public Lending Right body and transfer its functions (distributing payments to writers...