Mary Chamberlain

Mary Chamberlain is a British novelist and historian. She has been largely collected by libraries worldwide.[1]

Early life

Chamberlain was born 3 September 1947 in South London,[2] and holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh, The London School of Economics and Political Science, and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Family Life

Married to the political scientist, Stein Ringen.[3]

Historical career

Chamberlain is Emeritus Professor of History, at Oxford Brookes University.[4] Her book, Fenwomen, was the first book published by Virago Press in 1975,[5] and pioneered the use of oral history in the study of women’s history. It was also the inspiration for the Joint Stock Production of Caryl Churchill’s award winning play, Fen.[6] Fenwomen was followed by two further books on women’s history, Old Wives’ Tales: Their History, Remedies and Spells and Growing Up In Lambeth. From 1987 - 1991, she lived in Barbados, and began working in Caribbean history. Using oral history, she published two pioneering studies of migration and families, Narratives of Exile and Return[7] and Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration and the Anglo Caribbean Experience,[8] and a further study of decolonisation, Empire and Nation-building in the Caribbean: Barbados 1937-1966.[9] Chamberlain is widely considered one of the founders of oral history,[10] was the reviews editor of the Oral History Journal from 1977–87 and co-founder of the London History Workshop Centre.[11] She is the author of many articles on women's history, oral history and Caribbean history, has edited a number of books, and was a founding editor or the series Memory and Narrative. She has served on editorial, advisory and government committees,[12] and held visiting professorships at the University of the West Indies (1995, 2004), and New York University (2004). She has been the recipient of a number of research awards and is an adviser to the National Life Story Collection at the British Library[13] and the Raphael Samuel History Centre.[14]

Fiction career

Her novel, The Dressmaker of Dachau, was published in 2015, and has sold to 18 countries. She credits the inspiration for the story to two of her aunts, one of whom left the family and ran away, the other was imprisoned by the Nazi regime during the Second World War.[15] She is also the author of an earlier novel set in the Caribbean, The Mighty Jester.

Activism

Chamberlain was one of the London Recruits, a group of young people recruited by the ANC in the 1960s and 1970s to smuggle ANC and SACP literature into South Africa after the ANC had been decimated by the Rivonia trials of 1963/4.[16]

Bibliography

The Dressmaker of Dachau (2015) The Mighty Jester (2014) Empire and Nation-building in the Caribbean: Barbados 1937 – 1966 (2010) Memories of Mass Repression (editor, with Nanci Adler, Selma Leydesdorff, Leyla Neyzi, 2009) Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration and the Anglo Caribbean Experience (2006) Caribbean Families in Britain and the Transatlantic World (editor, with Harry Goulbourne, 2001) Caribbean Migration: Globalised Identities (editor, 1998) Narrative and Genre (editor with Paul Thompson, 1998, 2004) Narratives of Exile and Return (1997, 2004) Growing Up In Lambeth (1989) Writing Lives (editor, 1988) Old Wives’ Tales: Their Histories, Charms, Spells (1981, 20060 Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village (1975, 1983, 2011)

External links

References

  1. ↑ "Chamberlain, Mary". worldcat.org. Retrieved 20 October 2016.
  2. ↑ Who's Who, entry on Mary Chamberlain, 2006 to present. London, A & C Black
  3. ↑ Who's Who, entry on Stein Ringen. London, A & C Black
  4. ↑ http://www.history.brookes.ac.uk/People/Academic/prof.asp?ID=762
  5. ↑ http://virago.co.uk/the-history-of-virago/
  6. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/21/theater/fen-unusual-on-the-spot-creation.html?pagewanted=all.
  7. ↑ Paul Thompson, Review of Narratives of Exile and Return in Reviews in History, http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/46
  8. ↑ Alan L. Karras, Review of Family Love in the Diaspora, Migration and the Anglo-Caribbean Experience, in Journal of Social History, Vol 40, No. 4, summer 2007, pp1055-1057. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/217308
  9. ↑ Franklin W. Knight, Review of Empire and Nation-building in the Caribbean: Barbados 1937-1966 in The International History Review, Vol. 35, Issue 2, 2013. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2013.783155
  10. ↑ Mary Chamberlain interviewed by Robert Wilkinson, Oral History of Oral History in the UK, British Library http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLLSA7527501&indx=2&recIds=BLLSA7527501&recIdxs=1&elementId=1&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=2&dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1464862920186&vl%28freeText0%29=Mary%20Chamberlain&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic
  11. ↑ http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/13/1/182.extract. See also http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/c/F214649
  12. ↑ Paul Sutton, 'The Caribbean Advisory Group: A Memoir' in The Caribbean Journal of International Relations, Vol. 2, No.2, 2014. http://libraries.sta.uwi.edu/journals/ojs/index.php/iir/article/view/486
  13. ↑ http://www.bl.uk/projects/national-life-stories
  14. ↑ http://www.raphael-samuel.org.uk/about/centre-team-and-advisory-group/
  15. ↑ http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/rc//tag/dressmakers-war
  16. ↑ Ken Keable (ed), London Recruits: The Secret War Against Apartheid, Pontypool, The Merlin Press, 2012. Mary Chamberlain, ‘My secret war against Apartheid,’ The Independent, 8 April 2015. See also www.londonrecruits.org.uk, www.londonrecruits.com
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