Maureen Duffy
Maureen Patricia Duffy is an English poet, playwright, novelist and non-fiction author. Long an activist covering such issues as gay rights and animal rights, she campaigns especially on behalf of authors. She has received the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature for her lifelong writings. In 2025, she was announced as the inaugural winner of the RSL Pioneer Prize, founded by Bernardine Evaristo, to be awarded to a different woman writer aged over 60 every year for ten years.
Early life and education
Maureen Patricia Duffy was born on 21 October 1933 in Worthing, Sussex. Her family came from Stratford, East London. Her Irish father, an important strand in her identity, left when she was two months old. To add to an already difficult childhood, Maureen's mother died when Maureen was 15. She then moved to Stratford in East London, where she had family living.Duffy draws on her tough childhood in That's How It Was, her most autobiographical novel. Her working-class roots, experience of "class and cultural division" and close relations with her mother are key influences on her work. She developed an early passion for "stories of Ancient Greece and Rome, folk tales of Ireland and Wales, tales of knightly chivalry and poetry..."
Her mother, Duffy recalls, "early on instilled in me that the one thing they can't take away from you is education." she completed her schooling and supported herself before university by teaching at junior schools. She gained a degree in English at King's College London in 1956, then taught in Naples till 1958 and in secondary schools in the London area till 1961.
Career
Duffy's earliest ambition was to be a poet. She won her first such prize at the age of 17 with a poem printed in Adam magazine, soon followed by publication in The Listener and elsewhere. She later edited a poetry magazine called the sixties.While at King's she completed her first full-length play, Pearson, and submitted it for a competition judged by Kenneth Tynan, drama critic at The Observer. This brought an invitation to join the Royal Court Writers Group in 1958, when its members included Edward Bond, Ann Jellicoe, John Arden, William Gaskill and Arnold Wesker.
Duffy started writing full-time after being commissioned by Granada Television to write a screenplay Josie – broadcast on ITV in 1961 as part of the Younger Generation series – about a teenage girl, hoping to break out of factory work by pursuing a talent for fashion design. The advance of £450 enabled Duffy to buy a houseboat to live in. Pearson won the Corporation of London Festival Playwright's Prize in 1962 and was performed under the title The Lay Off at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It drew on Duffy's experience of vacation jobs in factories. Pearson/''The Lay Off is a modern reworking of Piers Plowman, and an early example of Duffy's inclusion of black characters in prominent roles and her opposition to racism. The set for Room for Us All recreates a small block of flats, with residents interacting, and the audience looking in as each is lit up. Two and Two Makes Five is about a teacher disillusioned by constraints on school culture deciding to quit the profession.
The play The Silk Room, about a male pop group, was produced at the Palace Theatre, Watford in 1966. An episode of TV drama Sanctuary'' was commissioned by Associated Rediffusion and broadcast on ITV in 1967.
Becoming a novelist
Duffy's first novel, That's How It Was was written at a publisher's suggestion and won great acclaim. While many reviewers dwelt on its vivid depiction of a working-class childhood, Duffy also emphasised that her goal was to show the influences that could form a writer and those that could encourage a preference for same-sex love.Duffy's first openly gay novel was The Microcosm, set in and around the famous lesbian Gateways Club in London. It was the first to depict a wide range of contrasting gay women of different ages, classes and ethnicities – and historical periods – to make a point that "there are dozens of ways of being queer". Widely reviewed, it sold well and inspired lesbian readers, including U. A. Fanthorpe and Mary McIntosh.
Duffy's other early novels deal with the life of creative artists. The Single Eye has a talented photographer gradually finding that his wife has become his rival, a restriction that holds back his life and his art, so that for the sake of his creativity and identity he must leave her. The Paradox Players, about a writer, draws on Duffy's experience of living on a houseboat. It shows the attractions of the freer life in an alternative community, together with its shortcomings. The paradox lies in the difficulty of sustaining this as a permanent lifestyle, as the pressures of the outside world break through.
Plays
In 1968, Duffy was one of five women novelists commissioned by Joan Plowright to write a play for the National Theatre with an all-female cast. Duffy's Rites was selected for a second run at the Old Vic, then the home of the National Theatre, and has often been performed since. Set in ladies' public toilets, it climaxes with an attack by a group of women on a "male", discovered too late to be a woman in a suit. It is described by Duffy as "black farce... pitched between fantasy and naturalism". Rites was shown with Old Tyme and Solo at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge in 1970. A sequel, Washouse, was set in a launderette run by a trans woman. All these plays had contemporary settings, but drew thematically on Greek or Roman myths.In 1971, Duffy was commissioned to write the second episode of the ITV series Upstairs Downstairs. Her play about the last hour of Virginia Woolf's life, A Nightingale in Bloomsbury Square, was performed in 1973 at the Hampstead Theatre Club, and also featured Vita Sackville-West and Freud as imagined by Virginia.
Duffy's BBC radio plays include The Passionate Shepherdess on Aphra Behn and Only Goodnight on Edith Somerville and Violet Martin. Family Trees deals with family history research. Afterword, a witty two-hander about a writer under pressure from a benefits officer was performed by Manchester University Drama Society in 1983. Megrim, set in a mythical matriarchy in the Welsh mountains, was performed at King Alfred's School of Speech and Drama, Winchester, in 1984. The Masque of Henry Purcell was staged at Southwark Playhouse in London in 1995, while Sappho Singing was performed there in 2010 and in Brighton in 2011.
Rites and A Nightingale in Bloomsbury Square have been published. Typescripts of other plays are accessible in King's College London Archive. A survey and analysis of Duffy's drama is available in Lucy Kay,.
Duffy's play Hilda and Virginia was shown at the Jermyn Street Theatre on 27 February – 3 March 2018. The twinned monologues performed by Sarah Crowden focused on the last evening of Virginia Woolf's life and several episodes in the life of Abbess Hilda of Whitby as recorded by Bede, where Hilda tells of the poet Caedmon and the shift in the church from Irish to Roman Catholicism.
Poetry
Duffy's first of nine poetry volumes appeared in 1968. They included Environmental Studies, which was long-listed for the Green Carnation Prize, and most recently Pictures from an Exhibition. Her Collected Poems, 1949–84 appeared in 1985.Her poetry ranges widely, in form from villanelle to free verse, and in content from erotic and lyrical love poetry to a humanist mass; family memories to political comment. Her work often references earlier poets from a contemporary angle, as in "Piers Plowless". Alison Hennegan credits Duffy with "the first modern lesbian love poems, unabashed and unapologetic. These showed what was possible." Their major concern is "sympathy for the human condition, devoid of sentimentality or condescension".
Fiction
Wounds creates a mosaic of London life by interweaving the voices of a range of characters, including a black mother, a local politician and a gay theatre director, whose lives contrast with the uplifting experience of two passionate lovers, whose encounters recur through the book. Love Child has a narrator whose gender is unstated, Kit, a child whose jealousy of its mother's relationship with her lover Ajax has tragic consequences – an Oedipal theme. Kit has also been identified with Cupid and the mother with Venus.Duffy's trilogy about London continues with Capital. The lives of a professor, Emery, and a self-educated, homeless eccentric Meepers, twine around "Queen's", interspersed with narratives of Londoners of various periods, including 14th-century prostitutes and Stone Age hunters. Many critics saw this as her most impressive novel to date. Lorna Sage noted her writing "becoming altogether more carnivalesque – more deadpan and more comic." The third of the trilogy, Londoners: an Elegy, brings dry humour to the challenges of the contemporary writing world, through a narrator of unspecified gender writing on Francois Villon. Londoners is also inspired by Dante's Inferno and draws parallels with Villon's medieval Paris; it is also notable for depicting gay pubs and characters.
Change, set in World War II, includes a group of apes as one set of narrative voices in a mosaic of stories of a wide range of ordinary people. Many of Duffy's later novels use contrasting and complementary narratives of past and present, a technique she first applied in The Microcosm. Restitution , eventually brings past and present together, as a young London woman gradually finds her identity unexpectedly altered by events in Nazi Germany half a century before.
Some of Duffy's novels deploy the storytelling techniques of thrillers, including I want to go to Moscow, Housespy, Occam's Razor, Alchemy, The Orpheus Trail and In Times Like These. Political passion often animates her work. The Microcosm makes the case for acceptance of lesbians; Gor Saga challenges assumptions about the gulf between humans and other species; In Times Like These warns of dangers in possible Scottish independence and in withdrawal of England and Wales from the European Union. Scarborough Fear is a horror story with a modern setting and Gothic elements, engaging its young narrator in a psychological battle for survival.