Trivia

Poet, playwright, novelist, nonfiction writer and activist.

In the late 1950s, she worked as a schoolteacher, before turning to writing full-time after being commissioned to produce a screenplay by Granada Television.

Won her first poetry competition aged 17, and completed her first play while studying English at King's College London.

In 2025, she was recognised for her contributions to writers and wider society by receiving the inaugural RSL Pioneer Prize from the Royal Society of Literature.

Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) founder.

Campaigned on issues such as gay rights, being one of the first public figures in the UK to come out as a lesbian and serving as the first President of the Gay Humanist Group in 1980.

Her literary biography of Aphra Behn (1977) led to rediscovery of the 17th-century playwright, the first woman to earn a living by writing, and established fresh facts about her life. She also edited Behn's plays and her novel Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, and written introductions to other works of hers.

Edited a poetry magazine called the sixties (1960–1961).

In 1968 she was one of five women novelists commissioned by Joan Plowright to write a play for the National Theatre with an all-female cast.

Received the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature for her lifelong writings.

Her play The Silk Room, about a male pop group, was produced at the Palace Theatre, Watford in 1966.