Leonora Eyles

Margaret Leonora Eyles (née Pitcairn, later Murray; 1 September 1889 – 27 July 1960) was an English novelist, feminist and memoirist. Captivity has been described by critics as "her strongest fictional expression of the chains that bind women, body and soul."

Early life Eyles was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, as the eldest of the three children of Andrew Tennant Pitcairn (1861–1905) and his wife Rosa, née Bevan (1863 or 1864–1902). The fortunes of her father's Staffordshire pottery were declining. She grew up at Tunstall near Stoke-on-Trent. She was educated at day schools and won a scholarship to stay as a pupil teacher at a local board school when she was 14. After her mother died her father remarried, but he also died three years later, leaving her in the hands of an uncongenial young stepmother.

Having been forbidden at home to take up a place at a teacher training college, she fled to London at the age of 18 and found an ill-paid job addressing envelopes. She then sold some objects left to her by her mother and raised the money to move to Australia as a domestic servant. There she married, in about 1909, the medical student Alfred William Eyles (born 1880), son of Sir Alfred Eyles, and had three children in 1910, 1912 and 1914, the last two in London. However, Eyles left her to bring them up on her own. She lived in Peckham, south-east London, doing ill-paid work, until she gained a post as an appeals writer for the charity Barnardo's.