In 2024, Blackburn with Darwen Library & Information Service secured grant funding from the National Lottery Fund through Arts Council England. This award provided a wonderful opportunity to promote local author Dorothy Whipple in her home town where she was born at 9, Edgeware Road, Blackburn on 26th February 1893.
Quite simply, our project, entitled ‘Dorothy Who?’ is an attempt to celebrate and promote her literary heritage in Blackburn, and to acknowledge how the impact of Dorothy’s life in the North influenced her writing.
The funding has enabled the library service to work with local schools and reading groups to re-ignite interest in Dorothy’s novels.
Additionally, this grant allowed us to engage the services of an academic advisor, Dr Cynthia Johnston, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Dr Johnston’s lecture delivered during the Dorothy Whipple celebration event in Blackburn Central Library on Saturday 7th June, 2025 is now available for you to read: Dorothy Whipple – The Blackburn Novels
A film was commissioned to reflect an awareness about Dorothy and her Blackburn heritage, which in turn, would create an enduring legacy resource for Cotton Town. A British Sign Language (BSL) version of the film is also available. Please see below to find out more and to view both versions of ‘Dorothy Whipple: Beyond The Pages’ .
The stories written by a young Dorothy Stirrup from 1905 to 1914 which were published in The Blackburn Weekly Telegraph have been recorded by Blackburn Library’s Community History volunteers.
Lead researcher, Philip Crompton, has transcribed several stories, please select the following link to see more: The Blackburn Weekly Telegraph Short Stories
Dorothy's early life in Blackburn was also of primary interest to our group of dedicated researchers. In this task, much credit is due to the late Barbara Riding (1930-2023) who was, for many years, the sole advocate for Dorothy Whipple in Blackburn.
Finally, work continues to widen access to the Dorothy Whipple Archive held at Blackburn Central Library, a list of the contents will be published on Cotton Town in in due course.
Published September 2025.
Ro Lara, film & video maker, was commissioned as part of the funding from the National Lottery Fund through Arts Council England to create a short film which reflected Dorothy Whipple's early life in Blackburn and how the impact of her life in the North influenced her writing style. Ro's collaboration with scriptwriter and actor, Nicky Hargreaves from Beggars Belief Collective brought together two creatives from different disciplines who embraced Dorothy Whipple and her literary heritage with dedicated and passionate enthusiasm.
Ro's words of gratitude to Dorothy convey his commitment the project:
Dorothy Whipple: Beyond the Pages is a short documentary about renowned novelist Dorothy Whipple. Through archival material and interviews, we learn about Dorothy’s connection to Blackburn, her struggles and achievements. Although why Dorothy’s novels declined in popularity during the 1960s remains a mystery, the film invites us to (re)discover Dorothy’s work and be inspired by the heroines of her novels. Similar to Dorothy's characters, the film’s creative process was about being human and the importance of the relationships we developed with each other. Blackburn Central Library brought me into the project, and I’ll always be thankful for the incredible opportunity to direct the film and for allowing me to step into Dorothy’s world.
Blackburn with Darwen Library & Information Service would like to thank the following people who graciously agreed to be interviewed for the film, Judy Eldergill, Dr Cynthia Johnston, and Nicola Beauman.
This production is protected by copyright, and may be used for private viewing only.
It may neither be broadcast in any way, including the internet, nor be copied or reproduced either by film
or electronic means,without written permission from the copyright holder.
British Sign Language (BSL) version of: Dorothy Whipple Beyond The Pages
This production is protected by copyright, and may be used for private viewing only.
It may neither be broadcast in any way, including the internet, nor be copied or reproduced either by film
or electronic means, without written permission from the copyright holder.
by Nicola Beauman
Nicola Beauman founded Persephone Books to restore some of the forgotten names of women's writing to their rightful place. Dorothy Whipple's novels were among those she was most pleased to reprint. Here she gives an assessment of Blackburn's most accomplished novelist.
Dorothy Whipple is one of Blackburn’s greatest writers, possibly its greatest writer but, sadly and mysteriously, she remains relatively neglected. Why is this?
She was an extremely popular writer in the 1930s and 1940s; then, in 1953, she wrote her last novel Someone at a Distance and it had no reviews and did not sell. The reason was that British society had changed so much since she started writing that her work abruptly dropped out of fashion and therefore from the book review pages of newspapers; or, to put it another way, the kind of readers who had enjoyed her work were now meant to be reading books by newer writers who might loosely be described as the ‘angry young men’ school. As Dorothy Whipple’s publisher told her in 1953, ‘editors have got mad about action and passion’, and although both are to be found in Dorothy Whipple’s novels, they are qualities that are presented in such a subtle, such an understated way, that the obtuse miss it altogether and think she is anodyne, simplistic, old-fashioned.
I came across Dorothy Whipple’ novels by chance when, in the early 1970s, I began research for a book about inter-war women writers that was eventually published by Virago in 1983. I admired and loved all the novels (there are eight, and three volumes of short stories) but my favourite was the last, Someone at a Distance. This is the one I would lend to friends over tea after fetching each other’s children, ‘nursery tea’ as we would call it with an ironic inflexion that is very Whipple-ish. So it was axiomatic that when I founded Persephone Books in the late 1990s Someone at a Distance had to be one of the first of the novels by women writers that we reprinted.
Since then we have reprinted three of the other novels and in the autumn of 2006 are bringing out a selection of her short stories drawn from the three volumes On Approval, After Tea and Wednesday. (One of these stories, ‘Wednesday’, can be found in the archive section of the Persephone Books website). And it would be no exaggeration to say that Dorothy Whipple has become many of our readers’ favourite Persephone writer.
And why is this? Well, in my view it is because of story. E M Forster said famously that ‘every novel tells a story’ and Dorothy Whipple has the gift of story-telling to an extraordinary degree. It is true that in one sense she does not write about ‘action and passion’. In The Priory we follow the fortunes of the people upstairs and downstairs in a large, decaying house near Nottingham; in They Knew Mr Knight a man borrows too much money – his wife cannot suppress her longing for a bigger house and garden – and goes to prison; in They Were Sisters three sisters marry very different men, one of whom (played by James Mason in the film based on the book) turns out to be a sadistic bully; and in Someone at a Distance a publisher in the Home Counties is seduced by an au pair and destroys his wife (‘Ellen was that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife’), his marriage and his happiness. Perhaps none of this is action as many people think of it. But to the reader of the novel the plot constitutes such a complete page turner that the most frequent remark made by Persephone readers is – ‘I could not put it down’: again and again they say that they could not really understand it but they could not stop reading. Even the editor of this page, who works in the Community History Department at Blackburn Library, told us that he read They Knew Mr Knight over a weekend – ‘a long time since I did that. It reminded me of when I was young and could lose myself in books.’
Another important quality is the way Dorothy Whipple writes. She may not be an amazing stylist like the New Yorker writer Mollie Panter-Downes. But her prose is understated, to the point, subtle and intensely readable. It was not for nothing that the Spectator called Someone a Distance ‘a very good novel indeed abut the fragility and also the tenacity of love’ or that Nina Bawden wrote in her Preface that ‘it makes compulsive reading’ in its description of an ordinary family. Or that Salley Vickers called The Priory ‘the kind of book I really enjoy, funny, acutely observed, written in clear, melodious but unostentatious prose, it deserves renewed recognition as a minor classic – a delightful, well-written and clever book.’
Dorothy Whipple is a superb stylist, with a calm intelligence in the tradition of Mrs Gaskell. As The Times Literary Supplement wrote: her article of faith was always and above all ‘the supreme importance of people’.
This article was published on Cotton Town in 2006.
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