Lettice Cooper

Education

She began to write stories when she was seven, and studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford graduating in 1918.

Career

She returned home after Oxford to work for her family"s engineering firm and wrote her first novel, The Lighted Room in 1925. She spent a year as associate editor at Time and Tide. Her novel The New House (1936) describes the events of a single day. depicts "Aire", a city based on Leeds, during the 1930s.

A main thread of the novel is the conflict between militant and moderate socialists, which finds bitter expression in the course of an unofficial strike, and during a Parliamentary election campaign.

During the Second World War Lettice Cooper worked for the Ministry of Food"s public relations division. is an unusually-structured novel, a psychological study of wartime and postwar anxieties on the battlefield and on the Home Front. The novel reflects her strong interest in psychoanalysis.

Lettice Cooper met Eileen Blair (George Orwell"s wife) during the war, and is thought to have used her as the basis for the character of Ann in Black Bethlehem. In an account Lettice Cooper recalled that Eileen described how Orwell read each installment of Animal Farm to her each evening and she came in each morning to tell her co-workers how the book was developing.

Snow and Roses (1973) is a novel set in Yorkshire and based on events of the miners" strike of 1972.

She wrote County Books series volume Yorkshire West Riding, published by Robert Hale in 1950. In 1987 at the age of ninety she was awarded the Freedom of the City of Leeds. At a Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association Congress in Stockholm, a Swedish writer remarked of Lettice Cooper: "She is what we expect English people to be but what they so seldom are.".

Achievements

• She was one of the founders of the Writers" Action Group along with Brigid Brophy, Maureen Duffy, Francis King and Michael Levey and received an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her work in achieving Public Lending Rights.

Works

More photos

• book

  • National Provincial

    (London published Fiction)

  • Robert Louis Stevenson (A Polestar pictorial biography)
  • fenny
  • Unusual Behavior (Lythway Large Print Series)
  • Unusual Behaviour

Politics

The characters cover a wide social range, and many are involved in left-wing politics. Between 1947 and 1957 Lettice Cooper was fiction reviewer for the Yorkshire Post.