Muriel Box

-
Standard Name: Box, Muriel
Birth Name: Violette Muriel Baker
Nickname: Tigs
Nickname: Tiggy
Married Name: Violette Muriel Box
Pseudonym: Evelyn August
Married Name: Violette Muriel Gardiner
Titled: Violette Muriel, Lady Gardiner
Indexed Name: Lady M. Gardiner
MB , who collaborated with her first husband, Sydney , in the mid twentieth century on numerous plays (the more than fifty which preceded the Second World War included two volumes of one-acters with all-female casts) and some film scripts, was also a remarkably versatile author on her own account. She was a solo scriptwriter and dramatist, a novelist (notable for the satirical, feminist, post-nuclear fantasy The Big Switch), autobiographer, biographer, and feminist publisher and editor. She has another claim to fame in being one of the first British women to direct films.
Numbers of works ascribed to her vary widely. The front of her autobiography lists, as well as nondramatic prose works and two solo plays, six plays or collections and fourteen screenplays co-authored with Sydney, and fourteen films directed by herself. The co-authored writings certainly, and probably other categories, are selected lists.
Black and white photograph of Muriel Box as film director, looking alertly forward with one hand on a large camera and the other holding an open script. Her dark, zippered jacket is open over a white shirt.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates George Bernard Shaw
He was an important figure in the lives and careers of almost innumerable women writers: a good friend of Annie Besant , Sylvia Pankhurst , Elizabeth Robins , and Christopher St John , a romantic...
Intertextuality and Influence Virginia Woolf
The original audience included Q. D. Roth (later Leavis) and Kathleen Raine . Women writers who later counted it an important influence on them included such disparate figures as Muriel Box and Rumer Godden ...
Textual Features Violet Hunt
The text consists of twenty-four pieces written by Ford and previously published in the Outlook and the Daily News, which are connected here by VH 's linking prose. Hunt's biographer Barbara Belford refers to...
Textual Production Vera Brittain
VB published her last book, Radclyffe Hall : A Case of Obscenity?, an account of the Well of Loneliness obscenity trial commissioned by Muriel Box for her publishing company Femina Books .
Berry, Paul, and Mark Bostridge. Vera Brittain: A Life. Chatto and Windus, 1995.
514
Textual Production Clemence Dane
The full title of this collection is The Shelter Book. A Gathering of Tales, Poems, Essays, Notes and Notions. Arranged by Clemence Dane, for use in shelters, tubes, basements and cellars in war-time.
British Library Catalogue.
Muriel

Timeline

By 28 November 1934
The young Flora Robson , in A Letter to a Young Actress, contributed as a preface to Ladies Only by Muriel and Sydney Box , provided a fascinating account of women's part in amateur...
Summer1939
Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, writer and film-director Muriel Box came upon and filed away an instance of British anti-semitism: a card or flier denouncing Jewish involvement in the army.
Late 1940
During heavy bombing of London by Hitler 's airforce, film-maker Sydney Box reported anti-semitism in the British Air Ministry , who wanted someone to make a propaganda film but won't do business with Jews.
13 April 1964
A trial opened in London after Alexander Dering (formerly Dehring), a doctor of Polish birth who had worked in Auschwitz, brought libel charges against US writer Leon Uris over a paragraph in his novel Exodus...