Leonora Eyles

Born Margaret Leonora Pitcairn in Swindon in 1889, Leonora Eyles grew up in difficult circumstances and left home young after being blocked from further teacher training. After time in London and Australia, she returned to England and supported herself and her children through poorly paid work before finding steadier employment as a writer.

That firsthand knowledge of insecurity and working women's lives shaped much of her writing. Eyles became known as an English novelist, feminist, and memoirist, and she also worked as a journalist and columnist. During and after the First World War she wrote about poverty, domestic strain, work, sex education, and women's independence in both fiction and nonfiction.

Among the books most closely associated with her are Captivity and the autobiographical The Woman in the Little House and For My Enemy Daughter. She also wrote practical and polemical works such as Women's Problems of To-Day, Careers for Women, and Commonsense about Sex. Leonora Eyles died in Hampstead, London, on July 27, 1960.