Ordinary Treasure

"Take away all that the working class has given to English literature and that literature would scarcely suffer..." - Virginia Woolf, 1940 The four women whose stories this book tells - Shelagh Delaney, Ann Quin, Buchi Emecheta and Andrea Dunbar - were born into and lived among working class communities. They wrote some of the most important works of literature of the 20th century. In the course of the book Laura will grapple with the meaning of working class identity, and consider how their personal and financial circumstances affected each writer's work, as well as how that work was and still is received, reviewed and discussed. As Laura will establish, these writers' experiences of being working class are woven into the very texture of their work - novels and plays which are critically important and often ground-breaking in their form, style and subject matter. Together, these women form a radical - and overlooked - history of working class literature in post-war Britain, while still being crucially relevant today. Each of these women created literary works that are about much more than, as one of Shelagh Delaney's reviewers put it, 'tenuous troubles by such limited people', and their contribution to culture and history should never be undersold or forgotten.