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Lettice Ulpha Cooper, (September 3, 1897 in Eccles, Lancashire – July 24, 1994 in Coltishall, Norfolk), was an English writer. She began to write stories when she was seven, and studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford graduating in 1918.

She returned home after Oxford to work for her family's engineering firm and wrote her first novel, The Lighted Room in 1925. She spent a year as associate edtior at Time and Tide. Her novel The New House (1936) describes the events of a single day. National Provincial (1938) depicts 'Aire', a city based on Leeds, during the 1930s. The characters cover a wide social range, and many are involved in left-wing politics. During the Second World War Lettice Cooper worked for the Ministry of Food's public relations division. Black Bethlehem (1947) is an unusually-structured novel, a psychological study of wartime and postwar anxieties on the battlefield and on the Home Front. The novel reflects her strong interest in psychoanalysis. Lettice Cooper met Eileen Blair (George Orwell's wife) during the war, and is thought to have used her as the basis for the character of Ann in Black Bethlehem. In an account [printed in Orwell Remembered] Lettice Cooper recalled that Eileen described how Orwell read each instalment of Animal Farm to her each evening and she came in each morning to tell her co-workers how the book was developing. Between 1947 and 1957 Lettice Cooper was fiction reviewer for the Yorkshire Post. Her novel Fenny (1953) is set in Florence, where she frequently visited her close friend, Lionel Fielden. She was one of the founders of the Writers' Action Group along with Brigid Brophy, Maureen Duffy, Francis King and Michael Levey and received an OBE for her work in achieving Public Lending Rights. In 1987 at the age of ninety she was awarded the Freedom of the City of Leeds. At a PEN Congress in Stockholm, a Swedish writer remarked of Lettice Cooper: 'She is what we expect English people to be but what they so seldom are.' She never married.

Selected Works

 * The Lighted Room (1925)
 * The New House (1936) (Reprinted by Persephone Books in 2004)
 * National Provincial (1938)
 * Fenny (1953)
 * Biography of Robert Louis Stevenson (1947)
 * Black Bethlehem (1947)
 * Blackberry's Kitten (1960)
 * Tea on Sunday (1973)
 * Snow and Roses (1976)
 * Desirable Residence (1980)
 * Unusual Behaviour (1986)
 * Une Journee avec Rhoda (1994)