70 results for typewriter

Annie Louisa Walker

She did not press for payment, and when the publisher, William Blackwood, offered her remuneration she replied that she knew about my cousin's debt to you, and it was because of this that I said nothing of payment for my work. As you wish to send me an acknowledgment of it now, I will willingly accept what you propose—fifty guineas and nine guineas typewriting expenses.
qtd. in
Colby, Vineta, and Robert Alan Colby. The Equivocal Virtue. Archon Books, 1966.
269n65

Alice Walker

AW took with her from Eatonton to Atlanta three gifts from her mother: a suitcase, a sewing machine, and a typewriter.
White, Evelyn. Alice Walker. A Life. Norton, 2004.
64-5

Alison Uttley

After her year at Cambridge she began, very cautiously, to write sketches of village life. She never thought of writing a book; she almost did not understand that books were actually written. With a pen, at least, it seemed impossible; it became feasible only after she first saw a typewriter.
qtd. in
Judd, Denis. Alison Uttley. Michael Joseph, 1986.
94

James Tiptree, Jr

Tiptree first mentioned the character who became Raccoona in November, as an unnamed friend and potential illustrator; the name came nearly a year later. Sheldon acquired for Raccoona a post office box, a new typewriter, and a signature, and began submitting under this name stories as written by a woman. She acquired, too, a number of fairly encouraging letters of rejection on the way to getting half a dozen stories published, the last in June 1977.

Flora Thompson

Her biographer mentions several FT stories of which no printed text is known or accessible. The Silent Piano (printed in a paper from which only this cutting survives) argues that an unplayed piano should be sold to raise money: for a bookcase, or pictures, or a typewriter for trade union work. Edmund (which surives in typescript) fictionalises FT's own last conversation with her brother Edwin before he emigrated to Canada.
Lindsay, Gillian. Flora Thompson: The Story of the Lark Rise Writer. Hale, 1996.
72-3 and n3, 77 and n7
Another unpublished story may reflect FT's own life: a husband, looking at the work produced by his wife (who is trying to become an artist), laughed with amused tolerance and advised her to stick to fancy needlework!
qtd. in
Lindsay, Gillian. Flora Thompson: The Story of the Lark Rise Writer. Hale, 1996.
100 and n9

Josephine Tey

She wrote the novel in less than three weeks (a contrast to the months or years spent on Kif) for a thriller writers' competition run by Methuen, with a prize of £250. She won the contest, and Methuen published the book in the UK.
Henderson, Jennifer Morag. Josephine Tey, a life. Sandstone Press, 2015.
119
Mann, Jessica. Deadlier Than The Male: An Investigation into Feminine Crime Writing. David and Charles, 1981.
212
Two editions also came out in New York that year: a full edition by E. P. Dutton, and an abridged edition by Mercury Publications under a different title, Killer in the Crowd, which introduced the pseudonym Josephine Tey. It was serialized in the Evening Telegraph in 1930.
Henderson, Jennifer Morag. Josephine Tey, a life. Sandstone Press, 2015.
128
It is dedicated to Brisena, who actually wrote it: a name JT gave her typewriter.
Henderson, Jennifer Morag. Josephine Tey, a life. Sandstone Press, 2015.
119

Muriel Spark

Spark's interest in Mary Shelley had first been aroused by reading Ariel, André Maurois' life of Percy Shelley. She said later that writing this book against time for economic reasons and at the same time trying to be scrupulously accurate was not easy.
Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Constable, 1992.
195
Having done most of the writing by night, she borrowed a typewriter for the final draft, which because of the noise she could not use while others slept. The book was published by Pen-in-Hand (later Tower Bridge Publications), which was no good at marketing and had to remainder 700 copies at the end of two years.
Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark. The Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009.
120
The book included as an appendix an abridged text of Shelley's The Last Man, then otherwise unavailable. It was slightly revised and published as Mary Shelley in 1988, minus its introduction and its original flowery chapter headings.

Evelyn Sharp

During the First World War, when ES had refused for years, on political grounds, to pay her taxes, when the amount owed had swelled with the cost of several summonses to fifty pounds, she was passed to the Bankruptcy Court and her possessions were distrained. (The same thing had happened a few years earlier to Flora Annie Steel, who lived in Wales.) After having a bailiff constantly present in her small flat for six weeks, Sharp had her furniture taken away (including carpet, curtains, typewriter, table, chair, and books: nothing was left but her clothes and her bed). Her treatment clearly had a political element, since a bankrupt manual worker was allowed to keep his tools, whereas she forfeited her typewriter. Part of her crime was refusal to reveal the sources of her income (including an annual £75 from a trust set up by her father). The authorities opened her correspondence and had her heat, light, and telephone cut off. Friends helped out by restoring these services, lending her furniture, then buying back some of her own for her when it was auctioned. She was finally discharged from bankruptcy only after she paid her back taxes when women got the vote in 1918.
Sharp, Evelyn. Unfinished Adventure. John Lane, Bodley Head, 1933.
164-8
John, Angela V. “’Behind the Locked Door’: Evelyn Sharp, suffragette and rebel journalist”. Women’s History Review, Vol.
12
, No. 1, 2003, pp. 5-13.
7
John, Angela V. Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869–1955. Manchester University Press, 2009.
84-5

Anne Sexton

As writing poetry and mixing with poets began to take up more of Sexton's life, her husband, Kayo, came to hate it more and more. Their rows about poetry regularly ended in his hitting her; on one occasion she began the violence by tearing up poems and throwing her typewriter across the room. (She had already frightened herself by using violence against her children.) A tearful reconciliation would follow these marital fights. Another source of friction (and on occasion violence) was the large role played by Kayo's mother, Billie, in caring for the children (which Anne both resented and relied on).
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
80, 152-5

Jean Rhys

She was drinking heavily during the writing of this painful novel. She had serious fights with her current husband, Leslie Tilden-Smith, and once threw his typewriter out of the window, fortunately hitting no passers-by several storeys below. Destructively violent, she tore up and burned several manuscripts during this time (Le Revenant and Wedding in the Carib Quarter as well as Good Morning, Midnight), and the first two of these were lost. While she managed to find several chapters of Le Revenant and used them in Wide Sargasso Sea, her notes indicate that her proposed novel about the Carib Quarter was too difficult for her to write.

Ann Quin

In 1965 AQ was living in a marvellously cluttered bedsitter in Notting Hill Gate, London. Its walls were hidden by a layering of pictures cut from magazines, its surfaces by books, a typewriter, and esoteric knick-knacks.
Quin, Ann. “Introduction”. The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments, edited by Jennifer Hodgson, And Other Stories, 2018, pp. 7-12.
7

Jean Plaidy

As she put it herself: Circumstances arose which brought my school life to an abrupt termination, and I went hastily to a business college where I studied shorthand, typewriting and languages.

Louise Page

The production was very simple: Of the three characters, Sally Bacon (the protagonist) wore a dress that would do for child, woman, and hospital patient, and Woman and Man, who play all the other roles—doctors and nurses, parents, brother, colleagues, friends, boyfriend, cancer survivors—were dressed alike. (It was LP's director, Nancy Diuguid, who suggested that one of the doctors ought to be played by Woman.) The set was also simple, small, cheap, and without props, the stage featuring only a circle of blue rope (whose vertical ends, hanging from above, could signify doors) and a polystyrene block which could be a bed, table, etc. LP was paid £120 for this play, and bought an electric typewriter with the money, mistakenly thinking that this would make her write better.
Page, Louise. “Tissue”. Plays by Women: Volume One, edited by Michelene Wandor and Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1982, pp. 75-103.
101-2
Page, Louise. Plays: 1. Methuen, 1997.
x

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Unpunished. Editors Golden, Catherine J. and Denise D. Knight, The Feminist Press, 1997.
203
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.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Unpunished. Editors Golden, Catherine J. and Denise D. Knight, The Feminist Press, 1997.
194
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.
Sutton-Ramspeck, Beth. Raising the Dust. Ohio University Press, 2004.
206

Rumer Godden

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.
Godden, Rumer. A House with Four Rooms. Macmillan, 1989.
117-18

Nadine Gordimer

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.
Carroll, Rory. “Mining for Nadine Gordimer”. The Globe and Mail, 3 June 2003, p. R4.
R4
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.
qtd. in
Walder, Dennis. “Nadine Gordimer obituary”. theguardian.com, 14 July 2014.

Bessie Head

In Francistown she again was able to draw on the generosity of friends who perceived her literary potential: Nini Ettlinger, who gave her, under the appearance of a loan, the money to buy a typewriter (but with whom she eventually fell out over criticisms of her writing style); Naomi Mitchison, who first wrote to her to correct some of her facts about Botswana; and Jean Highland, an editor at Simon and Schuster, who sent her paper and procured her an advance. Mitchison and Highland both became her lifelong friends.
Eilersen, Gillian Stead. Bessie Head. 2nd edition, Wits University Press, 2007.
108-10

Constance Holme

Some of these stories reflect the phase of influence by Tagore to which CH confessed.
Crosland, Margaret. Beyond the Lighthouse. Constable, 1981.
122
On 4 July 1936 CH mentioned the trouble she had had over writing her first short story for about ten years. I had forgotten how to write such a thing and fought with it in misery and rage writing and re-writing with dictaphone pen and typewriter.
“The Constance Holme Letters 1932-1954”. University of Tulsa: McFarlin Library: Department of Special Collections.
1: 6

Pamela Hansford Johnson

PHJ published her novel The Holiday Friend, having used a typewriter instead of longhand, following a minor stroke.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(26 October 1972): 10
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner, 1974.
138

Fanny Kemble

By 1874 FK was at work on her memoirs each evening, culling material from her diaries and from letters to Harriet St Leger. The reminiscences appeared from 1875 in magazines like the Atlantic Monthly under the heading An Old Woman's Gossip. She produced these manuscripts using a new invention, a typewriter. The many articles she wrote were published in three monograph collections.
Clinton, Catherine. Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars. Simon and Schuster, 2000.
228

Margaret Laurence

ML had often thought of writing her autobiography. She finished a draft of her memoir in July 1986, the month before she was diagnosed with lung cancer. While recovering from surgery she found herself physically incapable of revising on a typewriter, so her second version was typed from her dictation by Joan Johnstone. This process was finished on 6 October 1968, just three months before Laurence took her own life. Her daughter edited by smoothing and eliminating repetitions, but she also made many short cuts to bring down the overall length. ML dedicated this book to both of her children.
Stovel, Nora Foster. Divining Margaret Laurence. A Study of Her Complete Writings. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008.
314, 318, 325
The published work (whose title comes from a modern hymn by Sydney Carter)
Stovel, Nora Foster. Divining Margaret Laurence. A Study of Her Complete Writings. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008.
305-6
includes poems by ML, and letters to Adele Wiseman.

Bryony Lavery

The sizzling, three-page Writing with Actors begins by exploding the stereotype of writers hunched over typewriters in their lofty garrets high above the hurly-burly of the common throng.
Lavery, Bryony. “Writing with Actors”. The Women Writers’s Handbook, edited by Cheryl Robson et al., Aurora Metro Publications, 1990, pp. 48-50.
48
BL urges playwrights to think big, think the impossible, and to encourage actors to do the same: As a Woman Playwright you have a duty to create parts which a) Tell exciting stories about women, b) provide exciting parts for the thousands of brilliant and under-employed women actors in this country and c) do shows which we miserably under-catered-for 52 per cent of the population scour The Entertainments Guide weekly for!
Lavery, Bryony. “Writing with Actors”. The Women Writers’s Handbook, edited by Cheryl Robson et al., Aurora Metro Publications, 1990, pp. 48-50.
49

Penelope Lively

Others besides the lead story are just as intriguingly titled: The Voice of God in Adelaide Terrace, Help, and Revenant as Typewriter.

Marie Belloc Lowndes

MBL had a miscarriage (not explicitly named as such in her memoirs) during the first autumn of her married life (1896) after carrying a heavy typewriter. Her life was thought to be in danger, and for some time she was not allowed to get out of bed, or to see her husband for more than a few minutes each day.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Merry Wives of Westminster. Macmillan, 1946.
29-31

Edna Lyall

After her previous book EL heard about the existence of typewriters, bought one, and learned in three weeks to use it.
Escreet, J. M. The Life of Edna Lyall. Longmans, Green and Co., 1904.
51
She put research as well as Suffolk memories into this novel, working on seventeenth-century archives in the British Museum. It was the only one of her works (except In Spite of All) to be dramatised.
Escreet, J. M. The Life of Edna Lyall. Longmans, Green and Co., 1904.
59
Payne, George A. "Edna Lyall:" an Appreciation. John Heywood.
31-2