BIOGRAPHER Daryl Leeworthy has done an enormous service by providing this introduction to the important work of Elaine Morgan (1920-2013), who used her considerable talent to argue for socialism, peace, women’s liberation and progressive values.

She was also a prolific journalist, teacher, broadcaster and a serious theoretician who studied human evolution from a feminist perspective, with The

Descent of Woman (1972) among her most notable works.

Born in 1920 into a working-class family of Labour stalwarts in Pontypridd, Elaine (nee Floyd) became the first person from her school to go to Oxford, where she read English Literature.

After graduating, she moved politically to the left and was briefly a member of the Communist Party following her marriage to International Brigade veteran and active communist Morien Morgan, whom she had first met at a political rally.

Morgan’s early career was as a tutor for the Workers’ Education Association but she was to make her name as a scriptwriter for radio and television. Her greatest achievements were as the adapter of popular literary classics such as Testament of Youth, Mary Barton, How Green Was My Valley, Fame is the Spur and A Pin to See the Peepshow.

A successful playwright, she also wrote episodes of popular TV dramas such as Dr Finlay’s Casebook and Maigret.

She produced numerous historically based dramas for the BBC such as The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, along with biopics of famous women including Marie Curie, Gwen John and Anne Frank.

One of Morgan’s scripts was for the 1985 television film The Burston Rebellion, about the longest strike in British labour history, with Eileen Atkins and Bernard Hill as the Norfolk teachers Kitty and Tom Higdon.

These dramatic adaptations constitute an impressive body of work in themselves, but Morgan also had another equally successful career as a feminist theorist and writer on Darwinism. She was a leading proponent of the “aquatic ape theory,” otherwise known as the “waterside” view of human evolution and her views on this were outlined in her 1982 book The Aquatic Ape.

Her long interest in evolution was first shown in The Descent of Woman, where she dissects the gender bias embedded in many evolutionary ideas while strongly affirming Darwin’s basic scientific concepts.
 
Written under the influence of the Marxist approaches of Eric Hobsbawm, David Harvey and her fellow Welsh intellectual Raymond Williams, another noteworthy work is Falling Apart (1976), where Morgan expounds pioneering views on ecology and urbanisation.

She continued writing well into her 90s, producing the award-winning column The Pensioner for the Western Mail newspaper.

Published by Seren, £9.95.