In a Class of Her Own: Malachi Whitaker
Guest post by Valerie Waterhouse about Malachi Whitaker’s remarkable memoir of 1939, And So Did I, republished in September 2025 by Recovered Books
In December 2024, Brad Bigelow, editor of the Recovered Book series for the University of East Anglia’s Boiler House Press, contacted me for the name of Malachi Whitaker’s Literary Executor. He was interested in reissuing Malachi’s 1939 memoir, And So Did I, which had been out-of-print for thirty-eight years. I was able to reply that as of November 2024, Malachi’s Literary Executor was me.
Malachi Whitaker with her children, 1940s
The Executorship had come about following the sad passing of Malachi’s son, Michael Whitaker, aged 92, in February of last year. In agreement with his sister, Valerie Tordoff, Michael had decided to entrust me with the management of Malachi’s Literary Estate.
When I first met Michael in 2015, he lived a 15-minute drive from my parents’ Yorkshire home. I had initially approached him with the intention of writing a short article about his mother’s work but got swept up in the fascinating story of how Malachi’s life and writings intertwined. I sourced every Malachi-related book I could get hold of; and began delving into four boxes of papers in West Yorkshire Archives, Bradford, deposited by the Whitaker family. Soon, I became convinced that the 96 published short stories, articles and memoir pieces (so far identified), and Malachi’s light, dark and witty 1939 autobiography, filled an important gap in English Literature. She was one of few female authors who wrote literary fiction about northern working-class people in the first decades of the twentieth century. Unusually, her writings were based on first-hand experience. Eventually I began writing a biography of Whitaker, which will form part of a PhD thesis at Salford University.
Meanwhile, Brad Bigelow, the founder of the Neglected Books website had come to a similar conclusion. He had hoped to republish And So Did I for many years. Following our initial chat, Brad engaged Catherine Taylor, winner of the 2024 TLS J.R. Ackerley Prize for memoir, to write the Introduction to the new edition. He asked me to write the Afterword.
To quote from my Afterword:
In January 1939, the month that And So Did I appeared, Malachi Whitaker was at the zenith of both her professional and personal lives. Aged 43, she had already published four collections of short stories to widespread critical acclaim. This would be her fifth book with London publisher Jonathan Cape. After years of poverty, her husband had become the prosperous co-owner of a textile factory and the couple were living with their two adopted children, and a shifting cast of servants, at Bolton Old Hall, Wrose, Bradford, the Yorkshire house of Malachi’s dreams.
But shadows lurked upon the horizon.
[She was] afraid that her talent was beginning to wane. She worried, too, that Europe was on the cusp of a second senseless war.
Intended as a ‘journal’, the book can be dated from summer 1937 to summer 1938, covering selected episodes in Malachi’s daily life over a single year. But it also flickers forwards, and more often, backwards, following the vagaries of memory. Its structure recalls the single point-of-view, ‘stream of consciousness’ technique pioneered by Dorothy Richardson, whose novel, Pointed Roofs, Malachi read soon after its publication in 1915. Malachi was one of the first to apply this modernist fictional technique to memoir.
A quick and absorbing read, And So Did I sketches out some of the difficulties Malachi overcame to achieve her comfortable lifestyle at Bolton Old Hall. Born the eighth of eleven children of a Yorkshire bookbinder in 1895, ‘Olive Marjorie Taylor’ (her birth name) grew up in Wrose, Bradford. After leaving her local board school aged 13, she went to work at the family bindery.
Her father’s business failed at the start of the First World War, casting the family into poverty. ‘I still think that the most grinding misery of poverty is cardboard shoes,’ she wrote in And So Did I. ‘… I used to look in shop-windows and hate the rich and pretend that lovely shoes were silly because they had thin soles.’ In 1917, she married her soldier fiancé, Leonard Whitaker, and after the war, the pair slowly built a new life. She published her first book of short stories in 1929. Three further volumes followed in rapid succession, in 1930, 1932 and 1934.
And So Did I is a valuable companion to Malachi’s fiction – the subject of my upcoming lecture on Malachi Whitaker and Social Class for Literature Cambridge’s Women Writers Season. Here, the focus will be on short fictions from The Journey Home and Other Stories (Persephone, 2017), the only volume of Whitaker’s stories currently in print. The lecture will examine the qualities that make her writing stand apart, and ask how her life experiences, as a working-class-origin, upwardly mobile woman, fed into her work.
Malachi’s ‘otherness’ stems from her social position, as she makes clear in And So Did I. There were few working-class women writers publishing in the 1920s and 30s. It was her anomalous background which furnished the material for many of her stories. Malachi’s working-class characters are authentic and much appreciated by her readers. ‘I didn’t know that the people I knew were “the common people,”’ she told a friend in 1965. ‘They were my neighbours. I thought their lives were full of unusual interest, they were to me.’
Malachi’s literary circle revolved around the Progressive Bookshop in Red Lion Street, Holborn, London, where the bookshop owners, Charles and Esther Lahr, H.E. Bates and the Yorkshire-born author and Mass Observation researcher, Gay Taylor, became particular friends. In 1929, Vita Sackville-West wrote a glowing review of her 1929 collection, Frost in April, for the BBC magazine, The Listener, calling her a ‘born writer’ and comparing her, favourably, to Katherine Mansfield. As far as we can tell, Whitaker had little if any contact with upper-middle-class women contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rosamund Lehmann, nor with Sackville-West.
Her work rubbed literary shoulders most often with Elizabeth Bowen, who, however, Malachi does not appear to have met. In 1932, both were invited to contribute to Consequences, ‘a complete story in nine chapters each by a different author’, for the Golden Cockerel Press. In 1937, Bowen chose a Whitaker story for inclusion in the Faber Book of Modern Stories, which she edited. Bowen also wrote a particularly perceptive unsigned review of Malachi’s memoir in The Listener.
The cover of Whitaker’s memoir, republished in 2025 by Recovered Books, Boiler House Press
Mrs Whitaker ‘is not out to present herself,’ wrote Bowen, ‘she is out to present, as she knows it, the sheer process of living – and how superbly she does it’. Herself accustomed to loss from an early age, Bowen recognized the elegiac quality of Malachi’s book, which memorialises a fortunate period of her life at a moment of insecurity.
The Second World War proved to be a watershed for Malachi. Her husband resigned as co-director of his factory, and in 1949, her writing career finally sputtered out. Over the next twenty years, the pair bought, lived in, and sold a succession of houses to generate capital. Malachi’s final home was a council flat in the Yorkshire village of Embsay. She died in Skipton in 1976.
Nevertheless, as Bowen intuited, with the Persephone publication, and now the re-edition of And So Did I, Malachi’s legacy lives on. ‘Transposed into art, the house, somewhere in Yorkshire, exists for ever,’ Bowen wrote, ‘and the children, servants, relatives, friends, neighbours exist for ever, too’.
The new edition of And So Did I is dedicated to Malachi’s son and daughter, Michael Whitaker and Valerie Tordoff, who so generously entrusted me with their mother’s literary legacy.
Valerie Waterhouse
University of Salford
Valerie Waterhouse is a PhD Researcher at the University of Salford. In 2025, she won the Biographers International Organization Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship, to support completion of her biographical thesis on Whitaker.
And So Did I by Malachi Whitaker. Introduction; Catherine Taylor. Afterword: Valerie Waterhouse. (Recovered Books, Boiler House Press; September 2025.) Available from Bookshop.org.
The Journey Home and Other Stories by Malachi Whitaker. Introduction: Philip Hensher. Afterword: Valerie Waterhouse. (Persephone; 2017.)
You can hear Valerie lecture on Whitaker’s short fiction in our Women Writers Season, live online, Saturday 25 October 2025.
