Sector: Media
In the latest cinematic version of ‘Little Women’ aspiring writer Jo March sends her stories directly to magazines and publishers. About a decade after Louisa M Alcott wrote her book, the first literary agents started operating in the UK. It’s an industry where mergers and breakaways are common but one of the UK’s oldest literary agencies still retains its original name: A.M. Heath. Few people realise that it was founded by two women over a century ago.
Audrey Heath and Alice May Spinks met before the First World War, when they were both working at Massie Curtis Brown (where Nancy Pearn also got her start a few years later).
Audrey was born in Moseley, near Worcestershire, the daughter of a brass founder. She came from a large family and was not the only one with artistic / literary leanings: her older brother, Sidney, became a painter, specialising in old buildings and landscapes. She went to King Edward’s High School in Birmingham and read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating just before the start of the First World War. She then followed a well-trodden path for women interested in the literary industry, training as a secretary and getting a job at Hughes Massie & Co, which formed a partnership with Curtis Brown during the war. She worked on serial rights, foreign rights and title acquisition.
This is where she met Alice May Foreman Alice was four years older than Audrey, born in New Charlton in Hampshire in 1884. She married Sydney Spinks in 1909 and they had a daughter, Muriel, in 1911. Her husband signed up to fight on 3rd January 1917 and joined the Artists Rifles. Seven months later he was dead.
During the war Audrey and Alice were effectively left in charge of the agency and a very good job they did, too. However, the end of the war all meant the end of their responsibilities. When the men returned, they expected things to go back to the way they were before. Dissatisfied with their down-grading, in the autumn of 1919 the two women decided to strike out on their own. They combined their initials and surnames to create A.M. Heath in early 1920 and formally registered the business in early 1921. Their fledgling business was given a boost by the break up of the partnership between Hughes Massie and Curtis Brown. As part of the fallout, they lost their relationship with New York agency Brandt & Brandt (now Brandt & Hochman) who decided to partner with A.M. Heath on UK rights rather than pick a side.
Alice re-married in 1921 and had two more children. By the mid-1920s she had largely withdrawn from the day-to-day management of the business and from 1927 onwards, Audrey positioned the business as very much her enterprise.
What makes a successful agent?
Audrey mainly kept herself out of the press – like Nancy Pearn there is very little about her in the newspapers of the day. However, in the early days of the agency, when she was on a publicity drive, she gave a wide-ranging interview about the profession, sharing her views on the knowledge and personal qualities required for success. She was clear that both new and experienced writers benefited from a trusted relationship with their agent. New writers got a hearing from publishers and were protected from bad contracts. Experienced writers were freed up to concentrate on their work as their agent took care of all the negotiations and administration.
She broke the job requirements into two parts. First, the skills: a good agent needed an understanding of business psychology, enough legal knowledge to understand copyright laws and draw up contracts and obviously had to be widely and well-read. She made an important distinction between having sound critical faculties and being able to assess the market value of material, rating the latter as more important.
Then came essential qualities: being personally interested in ones clients, which might mean refusing to take on new ones if there was insufficient support for the existing list, and believing in one’s own judgment. ‘Never take up anything one is not prepared to back to the bitter end’, she advised. If a work had been rejected by eighteen publishers, you had to be ready to go to the nineteenth.
This final statement was prescient. Eight years later she would find herself in exactly this position when she tried to find a publisher for a controversial book.
‘The Well of Loneliness‘
Audrey seems to have been relatively open about her relationships with women. In 1921 she was living at 90A South Hill Park in Hampstead with a woman called Mary Ridley, a vicar’s daughter, who was working for the National Council of Women. There is no information on how the start or endpoint of this relationship but on the census that year they unusually both described themselves as ‘co-head of household’.
It is therefore not too surprising to find Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) among her clients, a gay writer who was independently wealthy and happy to challenge social conventions, wearing trousers and a monocle and adopting the name of John.
© National Portrait Gallery, London
She had started her writing life as a poet and then in the 1920s moved into novels. Her third book, Adam’s Breed, published in 1926, was very successful. It won the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, the UK’s longest-running literary award. This gave her the confidence to explore the relationship between two women in her fourth novel, The Well of Loneliness.
When Radclyffe and her partner, Una Troubridge, met Audrey for on 8th May 1928, her book had been rejected by eight publishers. Now they were about to try their ninth. Jonathan Cape had set up a publishing business with Wren Howard at the same time as Audrey and Alice had founded their agency and they were building a high quality list. They decided to take a chance on Hall’s latest book.
It was published in July 1928 with an introduction by Havelock Ellis who described it as “the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us today.” ‘There is likely to be considerable discussion about Miss Radclyffe-Hall’s new book’ said the Daily News, in a triumph of understatement.
There were many sympathetic reviews that recognised both the importance and the emotional heft of the book but on 19th August James Douglas, editor of Sunday Express, owned by Lord Beaverbrook and one of Britain’s highest circulation newspapers, launched a fierce attack. Arnold Dawson at the Daily Herald hit back: ‘Will stunt journalism be allowed to cripple and degrade English literature?’
Jonathan Cape responded by saying he was going to send copies to the Home Office and the Director for Public Prosecutions and would abide by their guidance. With William Joynson Hicks as Home Secretary the outcome cannot really have been in doubt. He had just successfully stirred up the Met to crack down on Kate Meyrick and earlier in the year DH Lawrence had decided not even to bother trying to publish ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in Britain.
So, when four days later the Home Secretary asked the firm to cease publication, it did. It all happened so quickly that the book never made it to some towns at all: the Aberdeen Press and Journal reported that enquiries at the library and every bookshop in town had come up empty. Within a week copies were changing hands at five times the already-high cover price.
Crisis averted said Truth, saying that a public prosecution would have been ‘a misfortune’ though like many others, it expressed its concerns that the opinion of one newspaper had so much influence. Jonathan Cape gave the French publication rights to a small publishing firm, Pegasus Press. At the start of October, Customs & Excise seized a shipment of 250 copies and impounded them for two weeks but decided they should be released. As soon as the books made it to London, they were seized by the police and a summons was issued to Pegasus Press and Jonathan Cape under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.
On 16th November 1928, the book found itself on trial. Witnesses were lined up to testify on the book’s behalf, including Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, but they were not called. The magistrate, Sir Chartres Bion, ruled against publication and all the seized copies were destroyed. It was also put on trial in the US early the following year but there it was cleared for publication and went on to sell hundreds of thousand of copies. It was not re-published in the UK until 1949, by which time Hall had died.
Later described by David Higham as ‘strident’, Audrey went on to steer the agency through the the next three decades, helped by Patience Ross and Cyrus Brooks. During the inter-war years serial rights were a particular important source of revenue as magazines like Good Housekeeping used fiction by big-name authors to keep their readers engaged. The business survived war-time paper shortages and a bombing and was still going from strength to strength when Audrey died on 29th December 1957. She would be delighted to see it still thriving today.
You can read more about the history of AM Heath here.
Other sources include:
Nottingham Journal 8/1/1920; Newcastle Daily Chronicle 3/2/1928; Daily News 20/7/1928; Daily Herald 20/8/1928; Truth 29/8/1928; The Times 3/1/1958
An Illustrated Who’s Who of Professional Business Men and Women (1927)
‘Literary Gent’ by David Higham (1978)
Women Who Meant Business 