Book Launch of And So Did I by Malachi Whitaker

Join us for the Virtual Launch of And So Did I, the latest title in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press.

This is a FREE event.

Taking part in the discussion will be:

• Catherine Taylor, author of Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time, winner of the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize
• Valerie Waterhouse, executor of Malachi Whitaker's literary estate and winner of the winner of the inaugural Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship from the Biographers International Organisation (BIO)
• Brad Bigelow, author of Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts (University of Nebraska Press, January 2026) and editor of the Recovered Books series.

"A dangerous attempt to break new ground." That's how The Spectator's reviewer described Malachi Whitaker's And So Did I when it was published in 1939. If it had been first released today, when the memoir is one of today’s liveliest genres, And So Did I would likely be received as fresh, honest, funny, and keenly perceptive. In 1939, however, readers and reviewers weren't prepared to read such a frank and controversial view of life as seen by a woman who questioned whether all her needs could be met in the confines of a traditional marriage, as a housewife and mother.

Malachi Whitaker's short stories were recognized as some of the finest English fiction of the 1930s, earning her the title "the Bradford Chekhov." After And So Did I was dismissed by many reviewers, however, Whitaker felt rejected and ended her career as a writer, publishing little new from then to her death in 1976. As Philip Hensher has written, “It is inexplicable how English letters failed to find a place for a writer of such verve, colour, range and power.”

‘It is difficult to put this book into any category except that it is one of those friendly books that should be on one’s bedside table, where it will scare away into serenity the bogeys that sometimes come in the lonely hours.’ — Times Literary Supplement

‘It is delightful. Not an autobiography, not quite a journal, it combines in a most original way the qualities of both.’ — New Statesman

This edition of And So Did I is introduced by Catherine Taylor, winner of the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize for her memoir, The Stirrings. The Afterword, about Whitaker's life before and after the publication of And So Did I, is written by Valerie Waterhouse, a veteran travel writer now at work on Whitaker's biography and winner of the first Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship from the Biographers International Organisation (BIO).