She never wanted to write about her years as a publisher, she said; she did so only in response to sustained nagging. She bought a lined pad to begin this book in, sticking stubbornly to pen plus steam-typewriter despite the siren songs of all the computer users I know. The chapter on Alfred Chester (and on his decline into madness and paranoia and hearing voices) had already appeared as an introduction to his posthumously reprinted novel The Exquisite Corpse.

MA has spoken at length about the literary life in Toronto in the 1960s and 70s: improvisational, inventive, and far from top-heavy with a sense of [its] own importance. During 1971-3 she was editor of Anansi Press in Toronto, and she later served on its board. She was also one of the organizers and impresarios of the All-Star Eclectic Typewriter Revue, a fundraising entertainment for the recently-formed Writers' Union of Canada on 9 May 1974 (or possibly on this day a year or two later) at which writers and reviewers performed, and Atwood herself took part in dance routines on snowshoes and in kilts. The revue, she says, brought together Canadian authors of all ages and regions, working as a team and making idiots of themselves for a common cause.

Having published her first, successful book, MD bought a four-pound typewriter and wrote through the early months of the second world war, first in the country with her family (including her sister's two children, the second a baby who was not expected to live), and later in a Mayfair flat she could only afford because the war was depressing rents..

BE was strongly influenced as a child by Nwakwaluzo Ogbueyin , her father's eldest sister, a story-teller in their home village of Ibuza. She used to gather all the young children around her and tell them stories of their heritage and teach them songs. To the young Buchi, she was my big mother, whom she longed to emulate. At the end of her autobiography, BE comments that she has tried to achieve this goal, even though she uses electricity, a typewriter and a language that belonged to those who colonized the country of my birth, instead of the moonlight and her own emotional language as tools to tell her stories.

BP began keeping a diary in 1931. Her papers are archived at the Bodleian Library , Oxford University . (BP took her degree at St Hilda's College .) This material includes unpublished poems, short stories, novel drafts, working notebooks, diaries (forty small notebooks, begun in about 1948, containing bits and ideas for novels as well as her record of life lived), and letters written throughout her life. After receiving an offer to buy her papers for a US library, Pym wrote to Philip Larkin about the packing case or tea chest, where the MS remains of Miss Pym are deposited. She said she normally worked straight onto a typewriter. If whole chapters exist in handwriting it is because I didn't have a typewriter available at the time, was away or ill in bed. At that time she decided not to let the papers go out of her hands.

KS 's father, Saleem Shamsie , is a company director who, like his daughters, attended Karachi Grammar School . He married Muneeza around 1968. He was among the first to encourage Muneeza to begin writing, and purchased a typewriter for her. He also edited articles for her.

There is evidence that DA felt compelled to return to writing later in life. During the second world war she began writing an autobiography, and mailed chapters to her sister Vera, who transcribed it with her typewriter. Eventually, however, she changed her mind and gave up on the project. Her daughter Margie later found her burning the entire typescript while spring cleaning.

When National Velvet and the film of it made her rich, she bought expensive presents for her husband and daughter, and some typewriters, and invested the rest. But she left her tax demands unanswered until she owed thousands in back taxes and interest.

She claimed in 2004 to have in her house a whole trunkful of literary manuscripts which she had tried unsuccessfully to sell. Two girls from the British Library took a look and promised to send an assessor round. Though she complained they never did this, she sold her archive to the British Library in 2005 for about £70,000. The material included drafts of novels, badly typed on a portable typewriter, as well as letters and research materials.

Before NB married she had been interviewed and accepted for her dream job: junior reporter on the Manchester Evening News, which she saw as the first step towards becoming a foreign correspondent. She never took up the job because she became engaged and her fiancé assumed they would live in London. Years later she remembered, I gave up what had been my ambition from the day Uncle Stanley gave me the typewriter [when she was twelve or thirteen] without a second's thought. In fact, I was out of my depth, playing at being grown up.

An Author's Note explains that while some characters in this book are actual people (under their own or invented names), the author and her mother appear part-real, part-fictionalised. The events of SB 's actual life, insofar as she had allowed her readers to know them, are clearly legible here. People in this book are often at cross purposes, usually unable to meet each other's needs or to time their responses successfully. Intellectual and emotional experience (SB 's own and other people's) is shown as irrational, comic, liable to cause unnecessary pain, yet deeply serious and important. The book picks up the protagonist-narrator of A Legacy where that novel left her, now explicitly named Sybille. It ends as, still not out of her teens, she copes as well as she can with her mother's morphine addiction. When at length her mother's much-tried younger lover abandons the mother and daughter at their passionately loved temporary home at Sanary-sur-Mer in Provence, he leaves Sybille his Remington typewriter: a significant moment implying the triumph of her vocation as writer.

By this point in her life, and probably much earlier, manuscripts show that MEB had either learned to use a typewriter or (less likely) was having someone else type her work.

Her chief reason for writing these letters, said VB , was the flow of correspondence coming to her from people asking how they could oppose the war, or making suggestions that women in particular should unite to stop it.VB wrote these letters in trains, air-raid shelters or wherever circumstances demanded. They were at first typed by Winifred Eden-Green on a typewriter standing on boards over a bath, since the free office space offered by the Peace Pledge Union was a bathroom. VB financed them herself until the half-crown subscription began to cover her costs. Among the first regular subscribers were Storm Jameson , Sybil Thorndike , and many in the armed forces, including VB 's future executor Paul Berry . Volunteers working to despatch the letters included Brittain's mother, aged nearly eighty. The envelopes were addressed by hand at first, and later by a rickety old hand-operated Addressograph machine, bought second-hand. Later again the bombing forced the team to move operations out of London to Eden-Green's Blackheath flat, from which she would take the filled envelopes to the post office in a suitcase balanced on a bicycle seat. Eventually the police called to ask questions; they took away a few sample copies but did not confiscate the subscription list.

From 1980 onwards, AB wrote a new novel every summer. She kept this up for more or less the rest of the century. She wrote without revision, except sometimes of a final chapter produced in haste and tiredness. She said: there are no drafts, no fetishes, no false starts; there simply isn't time. I write straight onto a typewriter, as though the novels had been encoded in the unconscious. She also confessed to writing almost with a therapeutic purpose: the badly plotted nature of life, she said, irritated her, and she was drawn to the capacity of fiction to mete out judgement. She firmly denied that her female protagonists were self-portraits.

DB and her daughter Janie were active anti-Fascists during World War II, though their specific activities and affiliations are unclear. In November 1944 Vanessa Bell wrote to Molly MacCarthy about some of the Bussys' work, having gathered at least some of this information from correspondence between Janie Bussy and Quentin Bell . The Gestapo had not searched such centres as the Bussy household where they would have found plenty of evidence of the kind wanted. . . . Janie evidently ran great risks, tapping away on her typewriter and helping Jews etc. though she makes very light of it all. In The Strachey Family, 1588-1932 (1968), Charles Richard Sanders writes that Dorothy and Janie Bussy did highly important work with the French Underground during the recent war, but he does not elaborate.

The publisher's advertisement said this was not everyone's book because of its modern style and subject-matter—a style which was, it added, as much a part of twentieth-century civilisation as the telephone and typewriter. Butts dedicated the volume to her close friend Ethel Colburn Mayne , calling it un cadeau peu digne (an unworthy gift).

MC kept the letters which Bevil Quiller-Couch had sent her from the front, and transcribed on a typewriter his letters to his parents from the army, those sent by his army friends after his death, and copies of the War Diaries for all the units in which he had served.

With Margaret Jourdain she lived a very settled life. Ivy managed the household. Though she could no more cook or clean than work a typewriter or drive a car, she dispensed solid and generous hospitality. Both women dressed in old-fashioned and somewhat frumpish style, but attended a large number of parties, and gave frequent tea, sherry, and dinner parties of their own.

EFcould not recall a time when she was not writing. . . . writing seemed the thing to do, perhaps because her father did it. She wrote stories at five, and at six some valentine verses for a little boy, entitled Keep True to Me and beginning, My heart has never beat before / As it did beat just now. Another work from about this time was a play. At seven, her effort to write a novel on her father's typewriter fell victim to her inability to manage the shift key. In another poem she wrote during this time, her father tried to curb her romantically derivative style by urging her to change mefrom [sic] to from me; she changed the word reluctantly, and minded very much. She showed him everything she wrote, and suffered acute anxiety over his judgment.

AF was writing out of a lifelong interest and even loyalty (partly personal, as a Roman Catholic and the wife of a Scotsman). She did her research as a mother of five and wrote the book as a mother of six. The baby (her youngest, Orlando) seemed to like the sound of my typewriter. Her book became an unexpected bestseller: the first of many. As she wrote later, for the first time in my life I had money to spend.

Although MG was usually short of money, the spring and summer of 1952 were particularly difficult: she was living in poverty in Madrid as she awaited news and money from her agent. She made some money giving English lessons, helped a Hungarian writer friend identified only as Frederick with research and typing, sold her clothes at flea markets, and pawned her typewriter, watch, clock, books, and grandmother's ring at the Monte de Piedad to buy food. She relished her visits to the Museo del Prado and once chose cinema over potatoes, a decision she regretted.

The story is thus a meditation on the nature of crime and punishment, and the title comes to resonate as it becomes clear not only that Vaughn's would-be murderers will remain unpunished, but more soberingly that the dead man escaped any consequences of his utter case-hardened inborn highly-developed criminality. However, the story ends on a high note, with the family restored to the inheritance of millions that Vaughn swindled them out of, and with Jacqueline headed towards marrying a doctor who has also attempted murder. Before this she has taken charge of herself and has had surgery to mend her broken body: I haven't been able to call my soul my own—much less my body—for nine long awful years. Now I'm going to have my own way for quite a while. Her crippled state, though it has its origins in a car accident, clearly externalizes the violence that has been done to her as a woman. Despite this violence, however, she triumphs and is clearly the moral centre of the text. The novel is interesting on the subject of information technologies: stenography, the typewriter, and the telephone all contribute, in the hands of women, to the defeat of Vaughn or to the unravelling of the mystery, and all are linked to women's new employment opportunities. As critic Beth Sutton-Ramspeck points out, however, the womanly art of needlework, in keeping an old coat in use for many years, is what leads to the discovery of the true will concealed in its lining.

RG wrote that she loved a pen, and handwriting, as she could not love a typewriter. She deliberately wrote a tiny script, to keep her work secret.

NG still maintained her regular writing routine at nearly eighty, composing on a portable typewriter during the mornings and revising during the evenings. Waiting for the muse to come and sit on your shoulder, she said, is not an option. Her writing shaped her life: it was learning to write, she said, that started her falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.