Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree

MK began publishing in 1885. During this decade she became friends with classical scholar and poet Andrew Lang , who advanced her career as a writer. Although she was never part of a literary...

Rowntree's biographer Asa Briggs credits Kendall's affective writing with bringing Seebohm Rowntree 's The Human Needs of Labourto life; he describes her as someone who always gave loyal and devoted service.

The mixed reviews that greeted Songs can be attributed to a lack of backing from Lang in advertising the book.Percy Addleshaw in The Academy found it in some measure a disappointment. Her...

During the second half of her life, from 1898, MK gave up writing fiction to focus on social reform, a shift that culminated in the appearance of How the Labourer Lives in 1913. In...

May Kendall is most notable for late-nineteenth-century poems characterized by sharp humour and sarcastic wit on topics related to evolutionary science and the new woman. Her novels employ sarcasm and irony to examine British...

For her first work of non-fiction, How the Labourer Lives, MK helped author and reformist Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree interview working-class familes about their nutrition and finances in Yorkshire, Essex, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire, and Berkshire.

Although not attributed to her, The Human Needs of Labour, a trenchant analysis of worker-employer relations published as by Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree alone, was MK 's last full-length work.

In the twentieth century, MK re-focused her talents on non-fiction [and] sociological investigations with members of the Rowntree family. She first worked with John Wilhelm Rowntree on a series of powerful essays in his York...