Lucy Jones may well be the best British painter who you’ve never heard of. There is no doubt about her disability, because she was born with cerebral palsy. But she has no intention of identifying as a disabled artist. She is a simply an artist, and a very, very good one at that. I hadn’t… Read More from Lucy Jones
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Judith Scott
She couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak and had Down syndrome. She spent years in an institution, until her twin sister rescued her. Yet today, her textile pieces are held in museums throughout the world and sell for tens of thousands of dollars. This profoundly disabled person was at the same time a great artist, whose work… Read More from Judith Scott
May Billinghurst
The Women’s Suffrage campaigner Rosa May Billinghurst was born into a middle class family in Lewisham in 1875. At five months old, she contracted an illness – almost certainly polio – which left her completely paralysed. Despite some recovery, she was left paraplegic, relying on calipers and crutches to walk, and usually resorting to a… Read More from May Billinghurst
Harriet Martineau
This week, the distinguished contemporary writer Ali Smith gave the inaugural Harriet Martineau lecture for Norwich Writers’ Centre, bringing alive a woman who in her time was ubiquitous, but who now is hardly known. Martineau was a political journalist, an early sociologist, a radical campaigner, a traveller and an author who inspired Charlotte Bronte, Charles… Read More from Harriet Martineau
Mabel Cooper
For some time, I have been seeking out a person with intellectual disability to include in this website. Despite books such as Downs: a history, and other historical research about intellectual disability, very few named individuals with intellectual disability have left a record. In the late twentieth century, with the growth of deinstitutionalization and consensus… Read More from Mabel Cooper
Rosa Luxemburg
When I was a politics student, it was the democratic socialists, not the authoritarians like Lenin who appealed to me, and in particular Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci: both committed to freedom; both great writers; and both disabled people who paid a heavy price for their courageous work in pursuit of a socialist utopia. Rozalia… Read More from Rosa Luxemburg
Sylvia Plath
A very welcome guest post to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath, contributed by my dear and esteemed friend Jackie Leach Scully, another graduate of Newnham College. There are a lot of women of a certain age – around 50 – who have, let’s say, an ambivalent relationship with the story… Read More from Sylvia Plath
Jacqueline du Pré
It is exactly 25 years since the death of the greatest ever English cellist, a player who will be forever associated with the Elgar Cello Concerto, and whose passion and directness struck all who heard or saw her. Jacqueline du Pré grew up in Oxford. Her father was an accountant, from a Channel Islands family,… Read More from Jacqueline du Pré
Flannery O’Connor
“The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes, there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.” Flannery O’Connor, who wrote some of the finest stories in the English language as well as two powerful novels, came from… Read More from Flannery O’Connor
Janet Frame
The Lagoon, Janet Frame’s first volume of short stories, sat on my shelf for years. Only when I visited Dunedin, her home town, did I discover that it was that book, or rather the prize awarded to it, which saved the author from a lobotomy. On my last flight back to Europe from New Zealand,… Read More from Janet Frame