EB was involved in a PEN conference which discussed the issue of help for writers in Axis countries (including contries recently occupied).

Early in the second world war she worked at an indeterminate job with the Ministry of Information , commissioning articles on the British war effort and placing them in US periodicals: the placing had to come first, so that pieces could be tailored to the specifications of the outlet. After leaving Hungary she lectured to women's groups in Tokyo (about European countries she had known, as a courtesy to her diplomatic hosts), and in the United States (about the British war effort, for my bread and butter, since her husband was now practically on the dole). (The Foreign Office did not at this date pay its personnel between postings.) She also lectured in Montreal (for the PEN Club ) and in Quebec city. After Pearl Harbor she found the tact with which she addressed the topic Should America enter the war? had suddenly become academic. But she also discovered that the reputation of US lecture tours for earning money was largely myth; she just about broke even.

JC belonged to the English Centre of International PEN , the worldwide association of writers.

FPC was a friend of Emily Faithfull , Geraldine Jewsbury , and Rosa Bonheur , and she knew Josephine Butler , Augusta Webster , Lady Battersea , Emily Pfeiffer , Anne Thackeray Ritchie , Helen Taylor , Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon , Lady Byron , and Matilda Betham-Edwards . Her involvement with Mentia Taylor 's Pen and Pencil Club from 1864 brought her into contact with yet more writers. She numbered Maria Grey , Emily Shirreff , Millicent Garrett Fawcett , Julia Wedgwood , and Florence Davenport Hill among her most beloved, and honoured friends. She never met Harriet Martineau but she claimed that with the two great exceptions of Martineau and George Eliot she could boast of having come into contact with nearly all the more gifted English women of the Victorian era. Presumably a relationship with Martineau was out of the question because of her friendship with Harriet's estranged brother James .

She is a member of PEN International , and has consistently spoken out against political oppression and punishment of writers opposing their national governments.

CAD was awarded an OBE in 1995. In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was created a CBE in the New Year's Honours List at the end of the year 2001 and acted as one of the judges on the Cardiff International Poetry Competition for 2003. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2012.CAD 's work is much taught in schools, despite the fracas over knife-fighting (above). She has been warmly praised by female fellow-poets. (Deryn Rees-Jones , author of the first book-length study of CAD , is one of these.)

BE became a member of PEN , the organization devoted to supporting writers who are persecuted for political or ideological reasons.

In 1939, EF became a member of the executive committee of the PEN Club . She remained on the committee for ten years, during which its chief work was helping with the escape and establishment of refugees. Her fellow-members included C. V. Wedgwood and Rebecca West . She also gave readings for children with Walter de la Mare (an old friend); one of the texts she read from was Fanny Kemble 's journal. In 1959, her house became a centre for the campaign to launch the Hampstead Theatre .

Before the First World War EHY was a keen climber or mountaineer. During the war she worked in a munitions factory after some time as a groom. She joined the Society of Authors during the 1920s, and also became a member of PEN .

As an established author, albeit well past most people's retirement age, PF lectured and read her work at festivals and other venues, served on the Arts Council 's literature panel, and was a member of the council of PEN .

In 1951 she took a job with the Red Cross , working as a travelling librarian visiting and servicing hospital libraries. She then moved into journalism, becoming a sub-editor on Weldon Ladies Journal in 1952, and assistant editor of Time and Tide from 1952 to 1954. During her Time and Tide years Veronica Wedgwood , under whom she worked, taught her to prune, to summarise, to edit. She stopped working when her first child was born, and began her serious career as a writer as soon as the youngest went to school. She is a member of PEN . In 2006 she served as short-story judge for the valuable Bridport Prize. (The poetry judge that year was Lavinia Greenlaw .)

In terms of later politics, AWE was a longtime member of PEN , and followed scientific, political, and economic developments with interest. She concerned herself with atomic weaponry, increased understanding of animal behaviour, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nuremberg trials, and the 1980s recession. In 1983, she described herself as a believer in Women's Lib (even if a mildish one).

Both AW and her husband were members of the Pen and Pencil Club .

In London, MW joined the Tomorrow Club , then its successor PEN , and the Bookman Circle .

The organisation was set up in 1935, at the end of the First International Congress of Writers held in the Salle de la Mutualité in Paris. It proposed to be a more partisan and effectual international force than PEN (the Society of Poets, Essayists and Novelists), which was established in 1921 and to which STW already belonged. The British section of the IAWDC was called the Association of Writers for Intellectual Liberty . The Central Bureau of the IAWDC linked the thirty-eight participating countries, and was headed by internationally respected writers such as André Gide , Thomas Mann , and Maxim Gorky .

JT did not self-identify as a feminist, though she was aware of having benefited from education in institutions which valued women as highly as men. She gave money to Scottish PEN , but her involvement went no further than that. She kept away from the nascent Scottish National Party .

ET wrote that she liked routine and was always disconcerted when I am asked for my life story, for nothing sensational, thank heavens, has ever happened. She had a passion for modern painting, and also enjoyed horse-racing. She belonged to PEN and the Society of Authors , and attended a Royal Society of Literature meeting chaired by L. P. Hartley to hear Elizabeth Bowen deliver a talk on the novel. She and her husband used to to go separate pubs in the evening, because she liked to sit silent listening to other people's conversation.

In England the winter before her first marriage AS taught at a girls' school, and after the marriage she worked in Soho, London, masquerading . . . as a publisher's advertising manager. She also did unpaid typing for the PEN club , but found her skills were not up to even this undemanding work.

According to Spalding, SS 's politics are hard to pin down. She felt uncomfortable in any group alliance; the activism of Naomi Mitchison or Vera Brittain seemed to her simple-minded. Nevertheless, she opposed Fascism and occasionally attended PEN meetings (the writers' organization in support of freedom of conscience), although lack of affluence prevented her from joining. In 1938 she joined For Intellectual Liberty , a group aligned against the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain .

AS largely avoids intervening with her authorial presence in her writing, and argues that there is no clear point of intersection between her work and her allegiances or identities, national, sexual, and so on. However, her feminist, progressive, and self-identified socialist politics have a fairly significant presence in her work: much of her writing deals in contemporary issues like anti-immigrant racism, homophobia, corporate greed, and climate change. For instance, her apprehension of UKIP 's rise in early 2015 presciently noted that there is an engagement point for the whole of the UK about this, around what United Kingdom means, what united means. She expressed sympathy with the migrants seeking better lives in the UK, in a piece for The Guardian in 2015 on the condition of detainees in Britain (part of the Refugee Tales project, http://refugeetales.org, of which Smith is a patron). In a speech she delivered as the 2015 PEN International H. G. Wells lecture on Wells 's movement towards a progressive discourse on human rights (also printed in The Guardian) she focused on the threat posed by then Prime Minister David Cameron 's proposal to scrap the existing Human Rights Act in favour of a British bill of rights. Of this Smith wrote: the government keeps calling it Labour 's Human Rights Act. It's not. . . . It is ours and belongs to all of us. They want to replace it with a British bill of rights—as if all nationalities are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Both kept up their political activity during the 1930s with active membership of such organizations as the National Council for Civil Liberties (whose first executive committee Sharp sat on) and of PEN International . Even after Nevinson's death, in her seventies, she did voluntary work for various bodies including the Friends .

Her first letter to Dear Mrs. Woolf, written on 26 March 1923, was an invitation to join the PEN club . Sackville-West did not yet know Woolf at all well, since she supposed Woolf might find the club's monthly dinners quite amusing; but she included a gender-bending joke, saying that at the prospect of Woolf for a member John Galsworthy had (so to speak) got up and made a curtsey. Within two years she was writing to Virginia dear and lovely, and saying things like Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude. But like most correspondences this one thrived on the muddle of life. The way that these two minds struck sparks continues to be evident after the sexual affair was over. This is Sissinghurst 250—is that Museum 2621?—Is that Virginia? This is Vita speaking,—yes, Vita,—a person you once reckoned as a friend—Oh, had you forgotten? Well, dig about in your memory . . . .VSW continues to insist that whereas she likes Leonard Woolf , she loves Virginia. The late letters she wrote her, including the very last, on 6 March 1941, generate the warmest feeling out of wartime shortages of hay, milk, butter, and petrol.

LMS was the first president of the Scottish PEN . Her obituary in the Times concluded: Many a Scottish and English poet . . . owes much to her encouragement shyly but sincerely given.

As a writer she was an assiduous attender of literary festivals, a virtuoso reader of her own and other authors' work. She tells a story from her whoring or book-promotion days of sitting beside Edna O'Brien at a signing (where O'Brien's books were going like hot cakes and hers were not) and successfully offloading a copy of her own work after concealing it inside an O'Brien dust-jacket. She sat on juries for literary prizes: the Whitbread, the Orange, the John Llewellyn Rhys, the Commonwealth, the Booker, as well as teaching on Arvon creative writing courses and lecturing abroad for the British Council . She served as a Vice-President of PEN International .