Josephine Kamm

Josephine Kamm (nee Hart) (1905-1989) was educated at Burgess Hill School for Girls, Josephine nurtured an ambition to be a writer, but resented her school's failure, common enough at the time, to prepare intelligent girls for university. On leaving school, she took a secretarial course, and continued to educate herself by wide and demanding reading. During the 1930s and the War years, Josephine worked for Jewish refugee organisations, and became a Senior Information Officer and writer of...See more

Josephine Kamm (nee Hart) (1905-1989) was educated at Burgess Hill School for Girls, Josephine nurtured an ambition to be a writer, but resented her school's failure, common enough at the time, to prepare intelligent girls for university. On leaving school, she took a secretarial course, and continued to educate herself by wide and demanding reading. During the 1930s and the War years, Josephine worked for Jewish refugee organisations, and became a Senior Information Officer and writer of pamphlets at the Ministry of Information. She also found time to write fiction, and between 1936 and 1948 published five adult novels. Like many writers, she did her stint on the committees of the National Book League, The London Centre of International PEN and the Fawcett Library, where she was impressed by the number of books for and about women. During the 1950s and 1960s, her fame as a writer for young readers was at its height; she fearlessly tackled then taboo subjects, achieving what she described as 'brief notoriety' with Young Mother (1965), a tale of teenage pregnancy. She also wrote for older children biographies of the explorer Gertrude Bell (1956) and writer and diarist Fanny Burney (1966), and histories based on the Old Testament. In 1958, at the suggestion of Josephine Kamm's publisher at Bodley Head, How Different from Us: A Biography of Miss Buss and Miss Beale , originally intended as a children's book, was expanded into an adult study. The book was successful, and the history of the women's movement in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries provided its author with a new topic to explore. Between 1958 and 1972, she published Hope Deferred: Girls' Education in English History ; Rapiers and Battleaxes: The Women's Movement and its Aftermath and Indicative Past: A Hundred Years of the Girls' Public Day School Trust. Long out of print, these titles have recently been republished in the Routledge Revivals and Library Editions series. See less