Partner Brigid Brophy
Queer Places:
Gateways Club, 239 King's Rd, Chelsea, London SW3 5EJ
Maureen Patricia Duffy (born 21 October 1933) 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 for her lifelong writings.
Brigid Brophy had a complex
amorous relationship with
Iris Murdoch, and later a stable partnership with Maureen Duffy, which ended in 1979.
Maureen Patricia Duffy was born on 21 October 1933 in Worthing, Sussex.[1] 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.[2] 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"[3] 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..."[4] Her mother, Duffy recalls, "early on instilled in me that the one thing they can't take away from you is education."[5] 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,[6] then taught in Naples till 1958 and in secondary schools in the London area till 1961.[6]
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.[7] She later edited a poetry magazine called the sixties (1960–1961). 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.[8] 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[9] – 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.[8] 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.[10] It drew on Duffy's experience of vacation jobs in factories. Pearson/The Lay Off is a modern reworking of Piers Plowman,[7] 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.[11] 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.[12] An episode of TV drama Sanctuary was commissioned by Associated Rediffusion and broadcast on ITV in 1967.[13]
Duffy's first novel, That's How It Was (1962) was written at a publisher's suggestion and won great acclaim.[14] 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.[15] Duffy's first openly gay novel was The Microcosm (1966), set in and around the famous lesbian Gateways Club in London (renamed the House of Shades). 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."[16] Widely reviewed, it sold well and inspired lesbian readers, including U. A. Fanthorpe and Mary McIntosh.[17] Duffy's other early novels deal with the life of creative artists. The Single Eye (1964) 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 (1967),[18] 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 (including rats in the food cupboard). The paradox lies in the difficulty of sustaining this as a permanent lifestyle, as the pressures of the outside world break through.
A lifelong socialist, Duffy was involved in early CND marches.[7] As a humanist she has regularly taken a lead in pressing her beliefs.
Maureen Duffy was the first gay woman in British public life today to be open about her sexuality.[5] She "came out publicly in her work in the early 1960s"[4] and made public comments before male homosexual acts were decriminalised in 1967.[39] In 1977 she published The Ballad of the Blasphemy Trial, a broadside against the trial of the Gay News newspaper for "blasphemous libel".[40] As first chair of the Gay Humanist Group from 1980 (renamed GALHA, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, in 1987) she spoke out on many issues such as human rights for those with HIV and AIDs. At the 1988 TUC conference as President of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, she succeeded with a motion deploring the passing of Section 28 "as an infringement of the basic right to free speech and expression".[41] Duffy has patronized the British Humanist Association since GALHA became part of it in 2012. Duffy is often invited by LGBT groups to read her work. In 1991, she appeared in Saturday Night Out on BBC 2, saying that progress in gay rights since her earliest TV appearances had been more limited than she had hoped. In 1995 she was placed by Gay Times as one of the 200 most influential lesbian and gay people in Britain.[42] She was included on the Independent on Sunday' Pink List in 2005.[43] In 2014, she gained an Icon Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement from Attitude magazine.
My published books:
