Rose Allatini – A Woman Writer

Read a sample of the book by clicking here. My monograph on Rose Allatini is now properly published and on sale. It is the first book to examine the full career of the author of the 1918 novel Despised and Rejected. It considers her whole output, over seven decades (and under several pseudonyms) and questions […]

Writing about Rose

For the past year I’ve been writing about Rose Allatini, and the book is nearly ready for publication. It should be available to buy by the start of June. I’ve called it Rose Allatini: A Woman Writer. Why? Because Olive, the novelist heroine of …Happy Ever After, her first book, declared: ‘I want to be […]

Rose Allatini on Radio Four

For four years the BBC has been running a dramatised serial about the First World War, following events as they happened, a century on. It’s called Home Front. I haven’t been listening, but today I was alerted to the fact that the latest episode mentioned Rose Allatini and Despised and Rejected.

In the ‘Huddersfield Examiner’

I came across a hint that in 1918 Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected had been reviewed in the Huddersfield Examiner, and since I live in Huddersfield I trotted along yesterday to the very pleasant Local Studies room of the Central Library to see what I could find. I had high hopes that it would be […]

‘Despised and Rejected’ – a Christian view

I hadn’t previously heard of The Church League for Women’s Suffrage, but I shall try to find out about them, having been sent this clipping from their journal in 1918. It is a review of Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected that does not mince words. (If you can’t read it satisfactorily, or if the whole […]

Mountweazel

The sad news is that the latest series of Only Connect has finished.  What will I do now on Monday evenings? The good news is that the last programme in the series gave me a splendid word that I had never encountered before. It is ‘Mountweazel’, a fictitious entry in a work of reference. These […]

Rose Allatini and ‘romance novels’

Rose Allatini The excellent news is that Persephone Books are republishing Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected as one of their Spring/Summer selections. This novel, of course, was the one that, published under the name of A.T. Fitzroy, described homosexuals and conscientious objectors sympathetically, and was prosecuted in September 1918 as ‘likely to prejudice the recruiting, […]