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Our RLF Estates Directory launches online

Ever since the foundation of the Royal Literary Fund, our work has been supported by writers. So, as we celebrate our 235th anniversary this month, we’re pleased to introduce our new Estates directory, which features information about the literary estates from which we benefit.

Over the years authors including AA Milne, GK Chesterton, Colin MacInnes, W Somerset Maugham, Arthur Ransome, Henry Reed, Marguerite Steen and others have left their copyrights or a share of their royalties to the RLF, sometimes making us the sole copyright holder in their works.

Some other authors from whose estates we benefit include:

Margaret Joyce (Peggy) Baker, whose series of children’s books about an intellectual talking tortoise called Homer includes Nonsense! Said the Tortoise (1949).

Ronald Blythe, a nature writer and chronicler of the countryside whose best-known book, Akenfield, became an instant classic when it was released in 1969, and is beloved by many for its vivid portrayals of life in rural Suffolk.

Poet Rupert Brooke, whose works included The Soldier, part of his Nineteen Fourteen series of war sonnets. The Soldier features the oft-quoted line:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

Mary Hocking, a prolific writer of novels including her Fairley family trilogy – Good Daughters (1984), Indifferent Heroes (1985) and Welcome, Stranger (1988) – which follows different generations of the Fairley family through several decades of the twentieth century, including the Second World War.

Ursula Holden, a novelist born in England whose 13 novels were inspired by the years she spent living in Ireland following the Second World War. Her Tin Toys trilogy was republished in 2013 by feminist publishing house Virago Press. Holden was also an RLF beneficiary during her lifetime.

Angus Wilson, who, as well as writing several short stories and novels including the satirical Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, was also a former World War Two codebreaker, one of the UK’s first openly gay authors, a celebrated LGBTQ+ campaigner, and the recipient of a knighthood for his services to literature.

For more on all the literary estates we manage, you can now browse our Estates Directory.

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