Her husband did not want the play published in the US, where she lived, using his name. Although he did not object to its publication or performance in the UK, actors and publishers there considered it too outspoken and contentious for the London stage.

The book went through many stages and revisions before publication: the first draft had been finished in February 1944. A related draft and stories survive, but no complete manuscript. Larkin wrote that he was in a mad mood when he sent the novel off to the Fortune Press , which, as he put it, published only dirty novels (a taste which was not out of tune with the camp and risqué flavour of other representations of Oxford at this date) and was a yelping ground for incompetents. Fortune published the novel on condition of Larkin's forgoing royalties on their first edition. In March 1963 he wrote to Faber and Faber to suggest that they might like to re-publish the novel and thus pre-empt any more unsatisfactory editions from Fortune—though in practice he paid far less attention to the quality of the text than to those of his poetry volumes.

UKLG has said: I intended to be a writer, as long as I can remember. As a child she submitted a story (breezy in style, involving a time-machine and the origins of life on earth) to Astounding Science Fiction (a magazine which she read with some disdain) and received a polite rejection letter, of which I was rightly proud. When she was twelve her discovery of the intensely mannered, intensely poeticLord Dunsany 's A Dreamer's Tales, with its imaginary Inner Lands, provided a moment that was decisive for her (though she did not understand quite why): I had discovered my native country. At fourteen she showed her poems to the poet and critic Josephine Miles , who was most encouraging.

From the age of eight RL spent whole mornings writing (verse dramas, epics, lyrics and narrative poems, as well as sketches and novellas). But later she cast them on the flames as juvenilia. She had a childhood poem published in Little Folks magazine, then a teenage one in the Cornhill. After this Cornhill took to turning down the steady stream of further writings with which she bombarded it; but once she reached Cambridge she began publishing poems in Granta (which her father had founded) and The Cambridge Review.

She had written most of its new contents at Dresden and elsewhere on her travels. As early as 1882 AL commissioned Clementina Black to approach publishers about what became this book. She had in mind Warne , Routledge , or Dean and Shaw , though the eventual publisher was T. Fisher Unwin .T. Fisher Unwin became AL 's regular publisher: she recorded it as a crisis and a triumph when at a party he asked her to dance.A Minor Poet had a second edition in 1891.

Charles Bradlaugh himself tutored EL on the subject of secularism for this novel, which was at first to be called Erica. She had nearly finished writing it by the end of 1882, but during the following year the manuscript went the rounds of half a dozen publishers, who all refused it, before Hurst and Blackett bought the copyrights to this and Donovan for fifty pounds. While she trudged from publisher to publisher, EL was heartened by looking at a memorial in St Paul's Cathedral to a relation killed at the battle of Camperdown (on 11 October 1797). She resolved that if necessary she would, like him, die fighting.

JM says the idea of writing a comedy was first suggested to her by Hope amid the disappointments that attended the appearance of her first novel. Again she published allusively, as the Author of Clarinda Cathcart and Alicia Montague. Her preface (which fills in her play's non-stage history in some detail) explains that good reviews of her novels fired her ambition to write something better calculated than fiction to bring her profit and fame. Hoping to have her play produced in London, she sent it blind to David Garrick in autumn 1769. Garrick, however, did not even read it, on the grounds that he had too many plays that season already, and passed it on. The next in line at first promised acceptance, either immediate or else as next season's first new piece. Later, however, he said that the death of the actor William Powell had changed everything and that JM should apply instead to George Colman . Colman rejected the play as lacking plot interest. Marishall again asked Garrick to read it, but he now said he would only agree with Colman. JM deduced that she needed a patron, and set out to find one; but Lord Chesterfield and Lord Lyttelton , while both praising the play, maintained that they had no theatrical influence.

The first piece of writing that she showed to her parents, a short story called Sucker, won her the gift of a typewriter from her father. It was rejected by more than a dozen leading US magazines, to reach print near the end of her life in September 1963 in the Saturday Evening Post.

Ashton-Morton; or, Memories of My Life, the first full-length fiction written, at seventeen, by Elizabeth Thomasina Meade (later LTM ), was published anonymously by T. C. Newby after she submitted it through a friend.

There, she has said, everything she submitted to the local magazines was published simply because the standard was so low. Yet an article called Karachi won for DM the Young Journalist Award offered by Westminster Arts Council in 1975.

LMM received notice from L. C. Page Co. of Boston that they wished to publish her novel for young adults entitled Anne of Green Gables; it was out by June of the following year.

EM sent the Monthly editor, Ralph Griffiths , a satirical ballad, The Distemper'd Muse, A Poem Address'd to F[ulke] G[reville] Esq., after Greville had vilified the magazine in print.

After this MM found things harder for a while. Between 1909 and 1914 she weathered the rejections of every magazine that published poetry other than the Bryn Mawr literary annual. The first to recognize and admire her work (in March 1914) was Floyd Dell , editor of Masses.

While living in Prague and Hellerau from 1921 to 1923, WM wrote a number of sketches depicting her experiences in these cities.She sent these to an agent in London, but they were all rejected.Moira Burgess included Muir's short storyClock-a-doodle-do in The Other Voice: Scottish Women's Writing Since 1808, An Anthology (1987). Two further fragments, Elizabeth and A Portrait of Emily Stobo, were published in 1992-3 in Chapman 71 (a journal launched in 1970).

By the time she entered high school she was keeping a journal in assorted and undated notebooks containing poems, bits of stories, drafts of letters, and reflections. One year into high school she began writing for the school paper, the Register, a humour column called Squeaks by Tillie the Toiler. She once recorded having written in three days (instead of the letters which she ought to have written): nineteen poems, four columns of Squeaks, three bitter tirades about things in daily life that she hated, one short short murder story; thirteen book reviews on books I never read; three imaginary conversations with (respectively) Satan, Rabelais , & the author of Elsie Dinsmore (Martha Finley ), and a dime novel. She developed an ambition to become a novelist. In fall 1928 she put a photo of Virginia Woolf on her desk, imitated Woolf 's style, transcribed passages from Katherine Mansfield 's journals, and parodied Gertrude Stein . She discovered Rebecca Harding Davis from a more than sixty-year-old copy of the Atlantic Monthly containing Life in the Iron Mills. Her own fiction at this time was political, autobiographical, and melodramatic. Expelled from school, she wrote in her diary: I must write. . . . it is all I have. Her writing began to reflect a personal transformation: after her first marriage her poems and other writing veered between the idyllic and ebullient, and the dark and despairing. In summer 1932, while pregnant, TO submitted some of her poems to Harriet Monroe for Poetry, A Magazine of Verse. Her covering letter mentioned how she could no longer write poetry that ignored social evils. Monroe never replied.

She sent her first sonnets to magazines under the name of C. Oman, and the rejection slips came in addressed to her father. There was not much Women's Lib. in my early days. At twelve, on holiday in France with nothing to read and kept indoors by her mother's afternoon rest, she began to write a play about the captive James I of Scotland looking forth from his prison chamber in Windsor Castle and espying the beautiful Joanna de Beaufort [that is, his future wife] picking roses. I had it all in my head and it came out like water from a bottle.CO and her friends acted this in the garden at Frewin Hall, after three rehearsals. When Edward VII died in 1910 she told her father that her muse was not sad enough to sing the king's death, but she became artistic editor of a school magazine started by herself and her friends. I imagine that most people who are going to write get enmeshed at some stage or another in editing a school magazine. Its first number appeared in January 1911.CO was serious about her writing. On holiday in Scotland she dreamed of finding the Harp of Scotland half buried in sand on the beach; she knew this meant she was to be a writer.

At five JA bought a notebook with a gift of two shillings, to do her writing in. As a child she was a great spinner of fantasy tales, first for herself and later for her younger half-brother. The spur for her first writing success was provided by her stepfather, Martin Armstrong , when he made a sally, unique for him, into writing for children, with a successful series for the BBC 's Children's Hour.Joan submitted her own Children's Hourstory, which the BBC accepted in 1941. This was the first of many pieces by her which they used, for the radio Children's Hour and later for the television programme Jackanory.

It is titled from a phrase in the book of Isaiah which is read by Christians as a prophecy of the persecutions awaiting the Messiah, or Jesus Christ. Its dedication, To You Who Made Me Understand, is obscure: did the dedicatee explain pacifism, or same-sex love, or the link between them as manifestations, for the majority, of the Other? Allatini first offered this novel to C. A. Reynolds of the publishing firm she had most recently used, George Allen and Unwin : Allen and Unwin was Edward Carpenter 's publisher, and Cutbill suggests that this may have been her reason for selecting them. Reynolds wanted to publish Despised and Rejected (along with Married Love by Marie Stopes ). Stanley Unwin did not care to handle either of these books, but he recommended C. W. Daniel , of the company bearing the same name , who dealt in both pacifist and occult texts (for the former of which he had already undergone one prosecution).

She could find no-one to produce her first play, All Day Long, which deals not with black politics or rioting but with a thirteen-year-old boy who moves North from the poor South and is learning to live with people's incomprehensible accent and with technological marvels like indoor plumbing.

PA wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Those Happiest Days, about schooldays, when she was about fifteen and herself at boarding-school. When she was eighteen and had recently left school she followed this with Multicolour, another novel or series of sketches of members of a vicarage household. The latter came within a hairbreadth [sic] of being accepted by a publisher. Her father paid for the typing of Those Happiest Days, but insisted on my watering down the franker, more shocking details of a fictitious incident in which the schoolgirl protagonist flirts with an American soldier and only avoids rape by first making herself sick and then kicking his face.

As a child DA began writing a play in which a cousin was to play the role of the good, blond and slightly insipid princess, while Diana was to be the dark, wicked one. She wrote poems fairly regularly while she was at school and occasionally at Oxford and later, recording or reflecting moments of intensity in her life. She submitted a few travel pieces and a comic piece to journals in the hope of earning money, but without success.

While an undergraduate at Oxford (from October 1925) he discovered T. S. Eliot , and was for a while obsessively modernist, as he had previously been traditional in the style of Thomas Hardy . He co-edited two successive volumes of Oxford Poetry (those for 1926 and 1927) with Charles Plumb and C. Day-Lewis respectively. In 1927 he also had a projected volume of poems rejected by Eliot at Faber and Faber .

Orientalist William Erskine helped to arrange the publication of this work.AB had hoped to be published by Cadell and Davies , but could not get them to take her on.

About twenty years after their spell of publishing MAB 's books for children to great acclaim, Macmillan , in the person of the son of her old friend Alexander Macmillan , rejected her 7,000-word manuscript of an animal book.