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.

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. Another unpublished story may reflect FT 's own life: a husband, looking at the work produced by his wife (who is trying to become an artist), laughed with amused tolerance and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!

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. 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. It is dedicated to Brisena, who actually wrote it: a name JT gave her typewriter.

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. 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. 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some of these stories reflect the phase of influence by Tagore to which CH confessed. 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.

PHJ published her novel The Holiday Friend, having used a typewriter instead of longhand, following a minor stroke.

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.

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. The published work (whose title comes from a modern hymn by Sydney Carter ) includes poems by ML , and letters to Adele Wiseman .

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

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.

Most of the letters here are addressed to CL 's mother, her editor-sister, and two close friends who were also relations, her aunt Theresa Earle and her cousin Adela Smith . Hating the round of social functions that her life involved, she used them as satirical material from an early age. The men are quite astonishingly the same, as men always are at a country-house shooting party, and it seems so odd they don't know me when I have met them so often before. She sometimes comments on her reading: Kipling , Thackeray , Tolstoy , Emerson . About half of the book dates from before her suffrage involvement; the second half offers racy, informal accounts of experiences which were later written up for various public outlets. The last letter she wrote with her right hand, before it was disabled by a stroke, noted how if the suffrage campaign in its earlier, non-violent phase had been recognised as legitimate political action, if deputations had been received and petitions attended to, the irrepressible force of women's desire for the vote would have been successful through normal channels. Her left-handed letters tend to be brief; her first type-written letter followed on 19 January 1917 the gift of a typewriter.

JWM began using a typewriter. This later, after she suffered a stroke in 1881, helped to her continue writing despite a partly paralysed hand.

FM was a speedy typist, and composed at the typewriter. She kept a notebook for jotting ideas for plots and episodes. She believed the business aspects of a literary career were more important than many writers would recognise, and kept her affairs firmly in her own hands. She dealt with several regular publishers (preferring to sell her copyright for a good price rather than to rely on royalties) and employed agents for US and Australian sales, and for translation rights. Some of FM 's letters survive at the British Library and the University of Texas . Others have been known to surface in the market.

The first piece of writing that she showed to her parents, a short story called Sucker, won her the gift of a typewriter from her father. It was rejected by more than a dozen leading US magazines, to reach print near the end of her life in September 1963 in the Saturday Evening Post.

From the age of seven Betty Spiro (later BM ) made up stories for her sister and brothers, and plays for them to act. As the end of her schooldays approached she became more serious about her writing, and spent five pounds on a second-hand typewriter which remained with her throughout her career.