And So Did I (Paperback)

In 1939, Malachi Whitaker was living with her family in the Yorkshire manse she had coveted since childhood. After years of poverty, her life of comfort-and success as a writer-had been hard-won. With war looming in Europe and worried about her ability to continue writing, she feared that this pleasant existence could vanish overnight. Aiming to capture the moment, she began keeping the journal that would become And So Did I.

Spanning the years 1937-1938, And So Did I is both a record of daily existence and an impressionistic account of Whitaker's life told through memories, speculations, and daydreams. Decades ahead of its time, it is a precursor to the genre-bending work of writers like Annie Ernaux and Deborah Levy.

'What is the use of life?' when danger lurks all around, Whitaker asks. Her determination to find joy in plants, insects, children, music, food and books will resonate with readers asking similar questions today.

Malachi Whitaker was the pseudonym of Marjorie Whitaker, born Olive Marjorie Taylor, the eighth of eleven children, in Bradford in 1895. She left school at the age of thirteen to help support her family, and married Leonard Whitaker in 1917. She began publishing short stories soon after and four collections were published by Jonathan Cape between 1929 and 1934. She came to be considered one of the finest English short story writers of her time. As she writes in And So Did I, by the late 1930s, she found writing increasingly problematic and she published few new pieces thereafter. She died in Skipton, Yorkshire, in 1976.

A PhD Researcher at the University of Salford, Valerie Waterhouse is Malachi Whitaker's Literary Executor. In 2025, she was the inaugural winner of Biography International Organization's Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship, to assist completion of her biographical thesis on Whitaker. In 2019, with the Bradford Civic Society, she co-organized the installation of a Blue Plaque at Whitaker's birthplace house in Wrose, Bradford.

Catherine Taylor is a writer, critic, and editor. Formerly publisher at The Folio Society and deputy director of English PEN, she won the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize for The Stirrings, her memoir of growing up in Sheffield, South Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s.