MAH published during the first half of the twentieth century, writing to support herself after a disastrous marriage and during a distinguished career in politics and the civil service. Many of her novels provide fictional treatments of topics that concerned her in public life: political charisma, pacifism, women's access to political activity. Her non-fiction includes books of history and geography, political analyses of the Labour Party the Trade Unions, and life-writing, most notably two successive volumes of autobiography, and the biographies of politicians including women who deserve to be better known for their activism. She calls her book about Newnham College a biography as well.

In her capacities as poet, novelist, and travel writer with a sharp eye for culture and politics, SOLM spoke for the early movement of Irish nationalism. She also wrote plays and verse. Her reputation, once dragged down by her politics, is now rising.

MGF was a very effective political writer. Early in her career, she was well regarded for her works on political economy, which included three successful books and numerous articles and reviews for periodicals including Macmillan's Magazine, the Fortnightly, and the Athenæum. Her writings and speeches on higher education for women were very influential. She wrote two novels; the first was a success, but second has been lost. Later, she became primarily known for her activism and considerable body of works (books, essays, lectures, and speeches) dealing with issues in the women's movement, particularly with women's suffrage.

After an extraordinary upbringing in 1960s South Africa, daughter of white Communist activists who operated underground, GS moved to England. She has published thrillers, literary novels, documentary or verbatim plays, and a memoir. Her strongest work concerns political struggle against misuse of power.

SJ was a prolific novelist with an intense commitment to political causes, especially pacifism, anti-fascism, artistic freedom, and various women's issues. Her fiction is generally thought of as realist or materialist in its techniques, and often draws liberally on fact (from her own life, historical events, and characteristics of actual people), though she experimented with its shape and matter more often than has been recognised. She also wrote political and polemical non-fiction, journalism, essays, literary criticism, and autobiography.

Militant suffragist EPL launched and co-edited the weekly journal Votes for Women with her husband, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence , in 1907. The journal began as the official publication of the militant suffrage organisation, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) , but in 1912 the Pethick-Lawrences distanced themselves from the WSPU and began to publish it independently. During the first half of the twentieth century EPL published a number of suffragist pamphlets, many of them printed versions of speeches she had previously delivered. Speeches she gave in her own defence at the conspiracy trial of 1912 were published in 1913. From 1908 to 1950, she wrote many letters to the editor on a wide variety of national and international political topics. Her autobiography, 1938, largely focuses on the militant suffrage movement and the involvement in it of herself and her husband, as well as on her pacifist activities after World War One.

Adrian (1883-1948) was the youngest Stephen child. After Vanessa's marriage he lived with Virginia at 29 Fitzroy Square, then moved with her to 38 Brunswick Square. Like Thoby, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge , where he read law. He later studied medicine and in 1926 qualified as a psychiatrist. It was he who, with Horace Cole , concocted the Dreadnought Hoax. During the First World War, he argued (unsuccessfully) on behalf of the conscientious objectors Lytton Strachey , Duncan Grant , and David Garnett . He was a politically active pacifist who worked in the No-Conscription Fellowship and the National Council for Civil Liberties . Before the Second World War he was actively anti-fascist, and Hussey reports that he alerted the Woolfs to the savagery of the Nazis and provided them with enough morphine for suicide should the Nazis invade England.

Feminist politician ER is called by a recent biographer the most significant woman in British politics in the first half of the 20th century. She wrote books, pamphlets, and essays on the various social and political causes to which she was committed throughout her long career. In many of her texts, she blends argument about more than one of the many movements or initiatives she supported, such as feminism and state-funded family endowments.

Her father, Robert Mannin , was a letter-sorter at the Post Office ; it was from him that EM inherited her socialism and her passion for politics. He died in 1949.

DM , cosmopolitan Irishwoman, is primarily a travel writer, with more than twenty books to her credit. She excels at vivid rendering of human international contact (often made over drinks), at trenchant and well-informed socio-political analysis (perhaps above all of Northern Ireland), and at the autobiographical aspects of her craft. Beginning in the later twentieth century, the political and social aspects of her books became steadily more important and her urge to seek out trouble spots began to predominate over the need to seek out beautiful and remote places.

HA trained as a philosopher and spoke of philosophy as her first love. She became better known for her writings on modern history and political theory, in essays, monographs, and her famous or notorious reporting of the Eichmann trial.

DM was a pioneer in many fields: poetry, drama, journalism, and fiction, and the genres with which the fiction of her period interlocked: letters, soft pornography, satire, secret history, romance autobiography, and political polemic. She was proud of being first in the field on the Tory side during the pamphlet wars of Queen Anne's reign. As critic Paula McDowell remarks, her writing identity was shaped by the new concept of print culture as an industry, an employer of labour.

Her family members and friends provided her with access to the worlds of male and female intellectual accomplishment and a powerful women's tradition of independent thinking: for example, NM 's aunt Elizabeth Haldane (Aunt Bay) was the first Scotswoman to be a Justice of the Peace. The feminist and scientific sympathies of the Haldane family were also expressed in intense political and social involvement.

The formidably productive and versatile DL , Nobel Prize winner, set her mark on late twentieth-century fiction and remained a force to be reckoned with in the twenty-first. Her major themes—life in colonial Africa, the problems confronting women (political, sexual, spiritual), human experience depicted through recourse to imaginary, extraterrestrial cultures—embrace most of the central concerns of her generation. As well as novels, short stories, science fiction, poetry, plays, essays, political analysis, travel books, and autobiography, she published light-hearted cultural satire and books about cats.

SP 's mother was the famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst . She was twenty years younger than her husband, and joined in his enthusiastic political campaigns before becoming involved in politics on her own. Sylvia always believed that her mother favoured her eldest daughter Christabel , and deeply resented what she perceived as coldness toward herself.

AR ranks as one of the most influential figures in the twentieth-century feminist movement, and as one of the most influential contemporary American poets (though her political activism impeded the usual workings of the canonisation process, producing a counter-flow against the voices raised in praise of her work). Like other great poets she has produced a body of theorising and critical prose that goes hand-in-hand with her poetry, and that has been almost equally clarifying and liberating for women seeking to understand the dynamics of history.

Maude Royden , famous as an early twentieth-century campaigner for women's status in the ministry of the Church of England , was also a preacher, suffragist, feminist, and anti-war activist. She published at least fifty works in forty years, most of them polemical. Her pamphlets, sermons, and speeches range in topic through religion and Christianity, women's role in the Church , sexual morality and birth control, female suffrage and women's rights, pacifism, and national and international politics. She established the interdenominational fellowship the Guildhouse in 1920, preached there, and published the monthly Guildhouse Fellowship. From the 1910s until the late 1940s, she published many letters to the editor of the Times as well as articles there. Her autobiography details her unconventionally shared life with the Rev. Hudson Shaw and his wife .

MG begins her autobiography with her local identity: I was Yorkshire born. My forebears, grandparents maternal and paternal, were all born in Yorkshire, in Leeds so far as I know. Born English therefore, she was baptised in the Church of England , when her godmother and godfather had promised quite a lot of things for me of which I knew nothing until later years. As a child she fully accepted this faith, though while she was at school it suddenly came to her that she was not sure that Jesus was God's son, and she also, thinking of her mother, mentally rejected the Catechism's assertion that she was born in sin. She signed the pledge of the Band of Hope , the Anglican children's temperance society (or teetotal society, as they called it), and was moved by Sunday School and even by a Mission at about the same period—yet from another Mission a few years later she precipitately fled. She suggests implicitly in her memoirs that her Christian faith was shaken when she discovered in the course of local political work that pious people cared more about the forms of religion than whether poor children got enough to eat. For a while she belonged to the Labour Church . She later took up more experimental belief-systems. Though she was never a formal member of the Theosophical Society , she was hugely impressed, and propelled into self-questioning that was new to her, by Annie Besant 's Karma (1895), which she felt to be reading her rather than letting her read it. She liked particularly the declaration inside the cover: There is no religion higher than truth. She also took an interest in Christian Science .

Augusta Gregory was a highly energetic and creative force in the Irish Literary Revival, which began in the late nineteenth century. Material from her collections and translations of Irish folklore, epics, and oral poetry inspired new literary works by herself and others. At the age of fifty, she began writing plays for the Abbey Theatre , which she co-founded and co-directed. Her skill at rendering idiomatic conversation, honed through years of listening to the stories told to her by country people in county Galway, is evident throughout her writing. In addition to her drama and folklore, Lady Gregory wrote several articles on Irish politics and culture, two memoirs, a history of the Abbey Theatre, diaries, and an autobiography. As a nationalist with an identity grounded in the ruling class, she can be seen as a colonialist reformer.

EBB was recognized in her lifetime as one of the most important poets of mid-Victorian Britain. She wrote a significant corpus of poetry which ranges from the lyric through the closet drama or dramatic lyric and the dramatic monologue to the epic, as well as letters and criticism. For much of the twentieth century, interest in her focused on her romantic life-story, her letters, and Sonnets from the Portuguese. Late in the century, critical interest in her epic female künstlerroman or verse novel Aurora Leigh and her other political poetry—in which she took up the causes of working-class children, the abolition of slavery, women's issues, and the Italian Risorgimento—revived. She is again considered one of the leading and most influential voices of her day.

South African born, Botswanan by political exile, the bi-racial BH was a living criticism of the South African apartheid laws. She began her writing career with journalism which in time became politically active, and went on to publish novels (her last one closely founded on historical research), short stories, and books about her adopted homeland. Her early death cut short her work on her autobiography.

Most of EH 's writing reflects on her experiences growing up in Kenya and her continued interest in African development. Her output includes both novels and non-fiction: autobiography, travel writing, political exposition, biography, and journalism, produced throughout the latter half of the twentieth century—her book-publishing career alone spanned more than sixty years. Sympathising from the beginning with the white settlers and increasingly with the black Africans, with a professional background in agriculture as well as journalism, she became a skilled interpreter of Africa to the world outside, even while remembering that no person of one race and culture can truly interpret events from the angle of individuals who belong to a different race and culture. This has not exempted her from later strong critique of her racial attitudes: attitudes which were normal, nearly inescapable, for her generation, her race, and her colonial identity.

HMW wrote, during the Romantic or revolutionary period, as a woman with a mission, eager to see change for the better in the political, international world. She was a radical and egalitarian in gender relations too, although she believed that femininity comprised especial sensibility. Despite her two novels (one original and one translated), she is best known for her earlier poetry and her later political commentary on events in France, cast in the form of published letters.

NG was a South African novelist and short-story writer who bore witness in her work first to the struggle against apartheid, then to the problems and challenges of building an interracial nation. She is widely honoured for her political ideals and integrity. Her topics included the effects of political structures on people (apartheid with its discriminatory labour and strike laws), relations across the colour line, family issues like teenage pregnancy and friction between mother and daughter, and the cultural predicaments left by colonialism.