Asked last year what it felt like to be hailed as a pioneer, the writer and activist Maureen Duffy, who has died aged 92, replied: “It’s a funny old thing. I suppose I’ll get used to it.” Yet there could not have been a more deserving winner for the inaugural RSL Pioneer prize, set up by Bernardine Evaristo and the Royal Society of Literature to honour the achievements of British writers aged over 60.
The author of more than 60 works – spanning novels, non-fiction and poetry as well as dramas for theatre and TV – Duffy was also a campaigner for the rights of animals and of her fellow authors, to whom she was famously encouraging. Her presence at literary events, her blue eyes surveying the scene over a smart three-piece suit, attested to an equally dogged activism.
As Duffy herself recalled, in a 1980 address to the Gay Humanist Group (now LGBT Humanists), visibility as a gay woman was the personal made political. She came out as a trouser-wearing lesbian at a time when the term “came out” itself was unknown, and “it was thought very risque for a woman to wear trousers with fly fronts. You could be spotted in the street immediately and spat at.”
Her awareness of the challenges facing outsiders infused her work, though her understanding of what constituted an outsider was capacious. It might be a butch lesbian, such as “Matt”, from her 1966 novel The Microcosm, which was set in the London nightclub Gateways, and was banned in Ireland and the Vatican, and in South Africa for showing black and white characters intermingling.
It might equally be an unkempt amateur archaeologist obsessed with the dark ages, the protagonist of Capital (1975), the second part of her London trilogy, or a boy genetically engineered from a human and a gorilla, in the sci-fi novel Gor-Saga (1981), which was made into a television miniseries, First Born, starring Charles Dance as the reckless geneticist.
Duffy regarded herself as an outsider from birth, after her parents fled east London for Worthing, in West Sussex, to escape the stigma of having an illegitimate child. Her Irish father, Cahia Duffy, walked out when she was two months old, leaving her mother, Grace Wright, to raise her daughter alone, on her earnings as a tailor, while struggling with the tuberculosis that would end her life when Maureen was 15. The two of them survived a bombing in the blitz, in which an aunt was killed.
Though her mother’s illness meant that her childhood was punctuated with stays in care and with relatives, Duffy expressed no bitterness, declaring herself “deeply encouraged as a child to be independent and brave, because she was so independent and brave”.
After Grace’s death, Maureen moved back to Stratford, east London, to live first with an aunt, and later with her Latin teacher – at Sarah Bonnell high school for girls – who acted as her foster mother. She fictionalised her experience in her first novel, That’s How It Was (1962), which was praised in a review by Doris Lessing.
She had published her first poem at 17, after winning a poetry contest. Her full-length play, written while she was studying for an English degree at King’s College London, also won a competition, judged by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, leading to an invitation to join the Royal Court’s celebrated playwrights’ group.
In 1961, she made her TV debut with Josie, part of Granada TV’s anthology series The Younger Generation, about a wannabe fashion designer. The commission paid enough to buy a houseboat on the Thames, which became the setting of a 1967 novel, The Paradox Players, about a writer dealing with rats and rot on a houseboat.
The following year, Rites, her all-female adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae set in a public toilet, was performed by the National Theatre under the direction of Joan Plowright, first at the Jeanetta Cochrane theatre and then at the Old Vic, the NT’s home. In a challenge to the feminist campaign for single-sex spaces, it culminated in the women killing a “male” stranger who turns out to be a masculine woman.
Her writing and activism were never far apart. In 1977 she published, in the Freethinker magazine, The Ballad of the Blasphemy Trial, a broadside protesting against the trial of Gay News for blasphemous libel, following its publication of James Kirkup’s poem The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name. Three years later, she became the first president of the Gay Humanist Group.
In 1972, she co-founded the Writers’ Action Group campaign, lobbying the prime minister, James Callaghan, and racing to the front of the 1977 TUC conference to demand “Why is it that everybody is paid and not the writers?” In 1979 a new Public Lending Right Act was passed, granting authors royalties for library borrowings.
Duffy became the chair of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), which she co-founded in 1977, and which makes an important contribution to straitened author earnings today by distributing secondary royalties.
As a vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist, she was a signatory – alongside Elizabeth Taylor – of an open letter to the Times in 1970, promising never to wear fur. She laid out the philosophical basis of her beliefs in Men & Beasts: An Animal Rights Handbook (1984).
A vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, and recipient in 2004 of its Benson medal for a lifetime’s work, she carried on writing into her 80s, publishing her final poetry collection, Wanderer, in 2020, and making her children’s fiction debut a year later with Sadie and the Sea Dogs.
Meanwhile, her back catalogue continues to be rediscovered. Her important 1977 biography of the 17th-century playwright Aphra Benn was republished in 2020, while First Born (Gor-Saga) was reissued in 2024, as part of a Gollancz SF Masterworks series.
A long-lost secular mass, Missa Humana, composed by the folk musician Dolly Collins from eight poems in Duffy’s 1968 collection Lyrics for the Dog Hour, finally received its world premiere at the Conway Hall in London in 2023, after friends unearthed an original score in her house.
