To Be A Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie

By Carl Rollyson

Jill Craigie – film-maker, writer, pioneering feminist and devoted wife to former Labour leader Michael Foot – led an extraordinary life.

Strikingly attractive, fiercely independent and politically radical, Craigie established a reputation as a film-maker with her 1944 film, Out of Chaos, becoming the first female director to gain national attention. Extremely talented and versatile, she wrote several film scripts, including one for Gregory Peck, numerous articles, radio plays and successful columns, but, although she produced many acclaimed films, she always struggled as a woman and a socialist in a male-dominated, conservative industry. At the same time she became fascinated with the suffragettes and close to many veterans of the fight for the vote, including Rebecca West. Inspired by their courage, she amassed an extensive archive that was much sought out by scholars, and embarked upon a monumental history of the movement, Daughters of Dissent.

Her fifty-year marriage to Michael Foot, the love of her life, involved her in politics at the highest level, while Craigie provided ferociously protective, though often critical, support as her husband’s career flourished. The couple’s mutual interest in literature and the arts made their Hampstead house a meeting place and refuge for artists, writers, actors and politicians alike.

Through unique access to Jill’s private letters, her friends and family, including extensive and extremely frank interviews with Michael Foot, Carl Rollyson has created an intimate, moving and honest portrait of an extraordinarily influential and charismatic figure, who never ceased to push the boundaries of what it meant to be a twentieth-century woman.

Carl Rollyson, Professor of English at Baruch College, The City University of New York, is the biographer of, among others, Rebecca West, Norman Mailer, Marilyn Monroe and Lilian Hellman.