Gay Taylor

Gay Taylor (, McDowall; pen name, Loran Hurnscot; 27 September 1896 – 29 November 1970) was an English writer and co-founder, with Harold (Hal) Midgely Taylor, of the Golden Cockerel Press.

Early life Ethelwynne (nickname, "Gay") Stewart McDowall was born on 27 September 1896 in Castleford, Yorkshire. Her father, Robert Moffatt McDowall, was a surveyor, and he and his wife, Helen (née Murdock) had three children: Ethelwynne; Hugh, born 1898; and Sheila, born 1910. Hugh died in an airplane crash in June 1918 while training with the Royal Air Force.

She attended Leeds Girls' High School, where she won a music scholarship and had her poems published in the school magazine.

Marriage

In April 1920, she married Hal Taylor, who was struggling to start a commercial orchard on property he had purchased near Waltham St Lawrence in Berkshire. Although their marriage certificate records her name as Ethelwynne, she had begun to use the name Gay, and for the rest of her life she was known to her acquaintances as Gay Taylor.

Founding of Golden Cockerel Press

As Taylor recounts in both No Goodness in the Worm and A Prison, A Paradise, the couple shared little in common aside from creative aspirations. But later that year, they purchased a printing press and other book-making equipment and founded the Golden Cockerel Press with the aim of publishing new authors in artistic limited editions of 500 copies or fewer.

In a manifesto announcing the opening of the press, they declared: "This Press is a co-operative society for the printing and publishing of books. It is co-operative in the strictest sense. Its members are their own craftsmen, and will produce their books themselves in their own communal workshops without recourse to paid and irresponsible labour."

Already suffering from the effects of tuberculosis, Hal Taylor relied heavily on the help of Taylor and her former roommates to set up and run the press, learning through trial and error.

Affair and death of husband

One of the first books published by the Golden Cockerel Press was A. E. Coppard's first short-story collection, Adam and Even & Pinch Me (1921). The press went on to publish more than a dozen short story and poetry collections by Coppard. Coppard began helping out with the press, in part in dismay at the poor quality of its releases of his work. He later recalled that "the type was poor, the paper bad, the leaves fell out, the cover collapsed."

He also began an affair with Gay Taylor. She became pregnant by Coppard but had an abortion. The affair played out over several years, and at one point, her despair over his interest in other women led her to attempt suicide. The affair was a central experience in Gay Taylor's life and she recounted it twice, once in fictional form in No Goodness in the Worm (1930) and later in A Prison, A Paradise (1959).

In January 1924, Harold Taylor was compelled by ill health to retire and the Press was taken over by Robert Gibbings. Taylor died on 12 March 1925. He bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his sister, leaving only £50 to Gay.

In the 1930s she began studying Schopenhauer and attempted to write another novel. She attended lectures by P. D. Ouspensky but found his system "too cold and too shallow for me". She also considered joining a community of Anglican nuns at Peakirk in Cambridgeshire. She wrote that the work was "full of sparkling surprises, given and received."

A Prison, A Paradise

In 1959, Gay Taylor published A Prison, A Paradise under the name of Loran Hurnscot, an anagram drawn from what she considered her worst sins, sloth and rancour. In The Times Literary Supplement, Elizabeth Jennings called it "a faithful, highly subjective account of a restless, tormented life".

Death

According to Elisabeth Russell Taylor, Gay Taylor "struggled in poverty and ill-health, preferring to buy books rather than a meal," living in isolation much of the time. She died of pancreatic cancer in Pencombe Bromyard, Herefordshire.

Works As Gay Taylor No Goodness in the Worm (1930)

As Loran Hurnscot A Prison, A Paradise (1958)