Doreen Wallace

Dora Eileen Agnew Rash (née Wallace; 18 June 1897 – 22 October 1989), known as Doreen Wallace, was an English novelist, grammar school teacher and social campaigner. In more than 40 novels she is seen to explore examples of "comic and tragic cross-purposes between different classes, sexes and generations".

Life Born on 18 June 1897 in Low Lorton, Cumberland (now in Cumbria) in 1897, Dora Eileen Agnew Wallace was the only child of R. B. Agnew Wallace and his wife Mary Elizabeth, née Peebles. She was educated at Malvern Girls' College and then took an English honours degree course at Somerville College, Oxford. Her father introduced her to poetry, but also drank heavily and sometimes fought with his wife.

Campaigning Wallace's social campaigning came to the fore in the agricultural depression of the 1930s. Her moves against the imposition of tithes led to the stock of two farms being impounded in 1935, a siege at Wortham Manor, confrontation with local Blackshirts, and bankruptcy in 1939.

Writings While recent graduates, Wallace and Eleanore Geach contributed a joint "Ballade of Ladies Who Died for Love" to the volume Oxford Poetry 1918, questioning why a woman would "Seek death to end your misery?/Why did ye not forget your pain/In new loves and new ecstasy?" Going to Sea (1936), The Time of Wild Roses (1938), Green Acres (1941), The Noble Savage (1945), Willow Farm (1948), Sons of Gentlemen (1953), Daughters (1955), Woman with a Mirror (1963), The Mill Pond (1966), An Earthly Paradise (1971) and Landscape with Figures (1976).

Wallace's non-fiction mainly deals with the countryside – The Tithe War (a vivid account of her activism, 1934), East Anglia (with R. P. Bagnall-Oakeley, 1939), How to Grow Food (1940), Outlook for Farming (1944), a gardening diary entitled In a Green Shade (1950) and Norfolk for the County Books series (also with R. P. Bagnall-Oakeley, 1951). She also wrote for The Times and the Eastern Daily Press in that period.

Wallace's poem "Ninety-First Birthday Ode", dated 18 June 1988, includes arguments for the right to die and for permitting euthanasia.

Wallace also gained a local reputation as a water-colour painter.