What do you think?
Rate this book
Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution
On 27 May 1958, A Taste of Honey opened in a small fringe theatre in London. Written by a nineteen-year-old bus driver’s daughter from Salford, the play would blow Britain open and expose a deeply polarised society. It would also make its young author a star.
As Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was telling people they had ‘never had it so good’, A Taste of Honey illuminated the lives of the millions left to languish in Britain’s slums. Delaney’s strong female characters – teenager Jo and her single mother, Helen – asserted that working-class women wanted more than suburban housewifery. The play provoked a barrage of press and political criticism, but was embraced by those whose lives had now been placed centre stage.
This is the story of how a working-class teenager stormed theatreland, and what happened next. Shelagh Delaney’s life and work reveal why women of her generation were provoked to challenge the world they’d grown up in. Exploding old certainties about class, sex and taste, Delaney blazed a new path – redefining what art could be and inspiring a new generation of writers, musicians and artists.
As Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was telling people they had ‘never had it so good’, A Taste of Honey illuminated the lives of the millions left to languish in Britain’s slums. Delaney’s strong female characters – teenager Jo and her single mother, Helen – asserted that working-class women wanted more than suburban housewifery. The play provoked a barrage of press and political criticism, but was embraced by those whose lives had now been placed centre stage.
This is the story of how a working-class teenager stormed theatreland, and what happened next. Shelagh Delaney’s life and work reveal why women of her generation were provoked to challenge the world they’d grown up in. Exploding old certainties about class, sex and taste, Delaney blazed a new path – redefining what art could be and inspiring a new generation of writers, musicians and artists.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published August 29, 2019
10 people are currently reading
127 people want to read
About the author
Selina Todd
8 books20 followersSelina Todd is an English historian and writer. From 2015, she has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Todd's research focuses on the history of the working-class, women and feminism in modern Britain. Since 2017, Todd has also been president of the Socialist Educational Association.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 20, 2020
Fascinating biography that puts Delaney's work in a wider context of working class writing and art, and social change.
January 22, 2023
Fair Play! Well written as biographies go and it felt explorative? too. Dense at times with the need for an occasional skim but enjoyed!
February 19, 2025
I saw a Taste of Hunny in 2019 and it really stuck with me. Loved reading about the playwright, very well-researched and fascinating.
August 18, 2020
As soon as you're born, they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school;
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy, you can't follow their rules.
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear.
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
----from "Working Class Hero," by John Lennon
Shelagh Delaney was a working class girl from Salford in the North of England. At the age of nineteen she wrote a play that became an enormous success, both in the United Kingdom and the United States. It was adapted into a movie, also well-received. The play and the movie were titled A Taste of Honey.
In the play, the central character, Jo, is also a teenage girl in the North of England. As the play begins, she is still in school and living with her mother, Helen. The mother has no regular employment and they are poor, frequently having to move from places rather than paying rent. Helen begins a relationship with Peter, a man several years younger than she is. Jo also begins a relationship with her first love, a black sailor.
The sailor and Jo discuss marriage, but he leaves on a ship, saying that he will return. Helen and Peter do marry. Peter does not want Jo around. Jo leaves school, gets a job in a shoe store, and finds a flat alone. Jo meets a young man named Geoffrey. It is strongly implied that Geof is homosexual. Jo realizes that she is pregnant. Geof moves in with her.
Geof tells Helen about Jo's pregnancy. Helen, abandoned by Peter, returns and tells Geof he is no longer needed. Geof leaves, not telling Jo he is going. Jo tells Helen that the baby's father is black. Helen becomes upset and leaves to get a drink, as Jo begins to have labor pains.
[This summary was cobbled together from the film script, information in this book, and material in Wikipedia.]
A Taste of Honey was one of a number of British novels, plays, and films that appeared around that time concerning people with working class backgrounds, most set in Northern England or the Midlands. These included: Look Back in Anger, a play (1956) by John Osborne, adapted as a film; Billy Liar, a novel (1959) by Keith Waterhouse, later adapted as a play and a film; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a novel (1958) by Alan Sillitoe, later adapted as a film and a play; A Kind of Loving, a novel (1960) by Stan Barstow, adapted as a film; Room at the Top, a novel (1957) by John Braine, later adapted as a film; 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," a novella (1959) by Alan Sillitoe, adapted as a film; and This Sporting Life, a novel (1960) by David Storey, adapted as a film, as well as a number of others. (Some of these were also adapted for other media.)
All of these had elements in common, but A Taste of Honey differed from most of them in one very important respect. As Selina Todd makes clear in this book, while all of them dealt with the British class system, A Taste of Honey was one of the few works of this kind that emphasized the place of women in that society as well.
Even at nineteen, Shelagh Delaney knew about the unfair treatment of those who were not wealthy in that time and place, especially women. At the age of ten, Delaney "had contracted osteomyelitis, a painful and life-threatening bone disease," and spent months in a children's convalescent home far from her family. When she returned, she had to study for an "eleven-plus" test (with which I was unfamiliar). This determined the rest of a child's academic life.
The lucky few Salford children considered "intelligent" enough to benefit from an academic education would attend Salford Grammar School or Salford Technical School if they were boys, Broughton or Pendleton High Schools if they were girls. But the vast majority of Shelagh's classmates would go to Broughton Secondary Modern School, where they would stay until fifteen when, if they were lucky, they'd get an engineering apprenticeship or an office job.
Delaney failed the eleven-plus.
She wanted to do something in the arts, perhaps as a writer.
She knew that a few working-class boys like Albert Finney and Albert Riley were making a name for themselves as budding actors and artists at Salford Grammar School... But life was different for girls. When Shelagh asked her teachers' advice about becoming a writer they disapproved... Girls were meant to look after others, either as paid teachers or secretaries, or as unpaid housewives and mothers.
Shelagh Delaney left school at seventeen. She worked at entry-level jobs and thought about writing a novel. She wrote a play instead, A Taste of Honey, and became famous and wealthy.
The book goes into the details of how the play was sent to Joan Littlewood at Theatre Workshop, how Littlewood accepted the play to be produced there, and how Littlewood helped shape the play into its final format. There were many changes, particularly in the relationship between Jo and Helen. This was the most fascinating part of this book to me.
Delaney's second play, The Lion in Love, was about a Salford family trying to cope with the pressures of post-World War II England. The family is made up of a married couple, Kit and Frank Fresko, Kit's father, who lives with them, and their children, a boy in his early twenties and a teenage girl. Littlewood did not like the play and Delaney worked on it without her. It was less successful than A Taste of Honey.
Delaney went to New York for the Broadway opening of Honey and also took part back in England in the production of the film version. She returned to New York, where she had met Harvey Orkin, a married comedy writer and talent agent some twenty years older than Delaney. They became lovers. In 1964, Delaney, then twenty-five, gave birth to a daughter, Charlotte Jo Delaney. Orkin and Delaney had no wish to break up Orkin's marriage, and so Delaney raised her daughter alone.
Shelagh Delaney never had another play produced on a stage, but she continued writing throughout her life. She published a book of short stories, Sweetly Sings the Donkey, wrote for radio and television, and wrote films, which included The White Bus, Charlie Bubbles, and Dance with a Stranger. She had three grandchildren, to whom she was close. Shelagh Delaney died of cancer at the age of seventy-two.
I realize that I have just summed up two-thirds of Delaney's life in one brief paragraph, but this book itself does something similar. Her life up to the birth of her daughter is given 155 pages; the rest of her life receives 56 pages. I think that is the major problem with this rather short book. Delaney's writing career did not end with her two produced plays, but there is very little information about most of it. Some of the films, particularly Dance with a Stranger, are discussed in more detail as are some of her radio plays, but they are given much less attention than her earlier work.
Likewise, some details of her later life seem scanty. Was she in romantic relationships? Did she always get along splendidly with her daughter? She is portrayed in the early part of the book as a loving sister to her younger brother Joe but then he vanishes from the book, to be dismissed in one curt, puzzling comment:
Some of those closest to her died in the early 2000s: her mother, her brother Joe and [her friend] Una Collins.
I do think that this book is good but could well have been better. It does have a fine last chapter titled "Shelagh, Take a Bow," which deals principally with Shelagh Delaney's legacy. Her work helped advance the issues of classism, poverty, and female empowerment. I will conclude with two passages from this chapter:
Throughout her life, Shelagh resisted the stereotypes to which women were meant to conform. She did this not least as a lone parent who was able both to enjoy motherhood and write about the losses it brought, as a lover determined to maintain her independence, and in her celebration of women's friendship. She was also clear that a woman should not be defined by a single event, whether passing the eleven-plus, writing a play, walking down the aisle or having a baby.
And:
When she enjoyed success with the screenplay of Dance with a Stranger, the media claimed they'd known she was a great writer all along. It was more palatable to peddle this myth than to admit that women like Shelagh had changed the world.
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school;
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy, you can't follow their rules.
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear.
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
----from "Working Class Hero," by John Lennon
Shelagh Delaney was a working class girl from Salford in the North of England. At the age of nineteen she wrote a play that became an enormous success, both in the United Kingdom and the United States. It was adapted into a movie, also well-received. The play and the movie were titled A Taste of Honey.
In the play, the central character, Jo, is also a teenage girl in the North of England. As the play begins, she is still in school and living with her mother, Helen. The mother has no regular employment and they are poor, frequently having to move from places rather than paying rent. Helen begins a relationship with Peter, a man several years younger than she is. Jo also begins a relationship with her first love, a black sailor.
The sailor and Jo discuss marriage, but he leaves on a ship, saying that he will return. Helen and Peter do marry. Peter does not want Jo around. Jo leaves school, gets a job in a shoe store, and finds a flat alone. Jo meets a young man named Geoffrey. It is strongly implied that Geof is homosexual. Jo realizes that she is pregnant. Geof moves in with her.
Geof tells Helen about Jo's pregnancy. Helen, abandoned by Peter, returns and tells Geof he is no longer needed. Geof leaves, not telling Jo he is going. Jo tells Helen that the baby's father is black. Helen becomes upset and leaves to get a drink, as Jo begins to have labor pains.
[This summary was cobbled together from the film script, information in this book, and material in Wikipedia.]
A Taste of Honey was one of a number of British novels, plays, and films that appeared around that time concerning people with working class backgrounds, most set in Northern England or the Midlands. These included: Look Back in Anger, a play (1956) by John Osborne, adapted as a film; Billy Liar, a novel (1959) by Keith Waterhouse, later adapted as a play and a film; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a novel (1958) by Alan Sillitoe, later adapted as a film and a play; A Kind of Loving, a novel (1960) by Stan Barstow, adapted as a film; Room at the Top, a novel (1957) by John Braine, later adapted as a film; 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," a novella (1959) by Alan Sillitoe, adapted as a film; and This Sporting Life, a novel (1960) by David Storey, adapted as a film, as well as a number of others. (Some of these were also adapted for other media.)
All of these had elements in common, but A Taste of Honey differed from most of them in one very important respect. As Selina Todd makes clear in this book, while all of them dealt with the British class system, A Taste of Honey was one of the few works of this kind that emphasized the place of women in that society as well.
Even at nineteen, Shelagh Delaney knew about the unfair treatment of those who were not wealthy in that time and place, especially women. At the age of ten, Delaney "had contracted osteomyelitis, a painful and life-threatening bone disease," and spent months in a children's convalescent home far from her family. When she returned, she had to study for an "eleven-plus" test (with which I was unfamiliar). This determined the rest of a child's academic life.
The lucky few Salford children considered "intelligent" enough to benefit from an academic education would attend Salford Grammar School or Salford Technical School if they were boys, Broughton or Pendleton High Schools if they were girls. But the vast majority of Shelagh's classmates would go to Broughton Secondary Modern School, where they would stay until fifteen when, if they were lucky, they'd get an engineering apprenticeship or an office job.
Delaney failed the eleven-plus.
She wanted to do something in the arts, perhaps as a writer.
She knew that a few working-class boys like Albert Finney and Albert Riley were making a name for themselves as budding actors and artists at Salford Grammar School... But life was different for girls. When Shelagh asked her teachers' advice about becoming a writer they disapproved... Girls were meant to look after others, either as paid teachers or secretaries, or as unpaid housewives and mothers.
Shelagh Delaney left school at seventeen. She worked at entry-level jobs and thought about writing a novel. She wrote a play instead, A Taste of Honey, and became famous and wealthy.
The book goes into the details of how the play was sent to Joan Littlewood at Theatre Workshop, how Littlewood accepted the play to be produced there, and how Littlewood helped shape the play into its final format. There were many changes, particularly in the relationship between Jo and Helen. This was the most fascinating part of this book to me.
Delaney's second play, The Lion in Love, was about a Salford family trying to cope with the pressures of post-World War II England. The family is made up of a married couple, Kit and Frank Fresko, Kit's father, who lives with them, and their children, a boy in his early twenties and a teenage girl. Littlewood did not like the play and Delaney worked on it without her. It was less successful than A Taste of Honey.
Delaney went to New York for the Broadway opening of Honey and also took part back in England in the production of the film version. She returned to New York, where she had met Harvey Orkin, a married comedy writer and talent agent some twenty years older than Delaney. They became lovers. In 1964, Delaney, then twenty-five, gave birth to a daughter, Charlotte Jo Delaney. Orkin and Delaney had no wish to break up Orkin's marriage, and so Delaney raised her daughter alone.
Shelagh Delaney never had another play produced on a stage, but she continued writing throughout her life. She published a book of short stories, Sweetly Sings the Donkey, wrote for radio and television, and wrote films, which included The White Bus, Charlie Bubbles, and Dance with a Stranger. She had three grandchildren, to whom she was close. Shelagh Delaney died of cancer at the age of seventy-two.
I realize that I have just summed up two-thirds of Delaney's life in one brief paragraph, but this book itself does something similar. Her life up to the birth of her daughter is given 155 pages; the rest of her life receives 56 pages. I think that is the major problem with this rather short book. Delaney's writing career did not end with her two produced plays, but there is very little information about most of it. Some of the films, particularly Dance with a Stranger, are discussed in more detail as are some of her radio plays, but they are given much less attention than her earlier work.
Likewise, some details of her later life seem scanty. Was she in romantic relationships? Did she always get along splendidly with her daughter? She is portrayed in the early part of the book as a loving sister to her younger brother Joe but then he vanishes from the book, to be dismissed in one curt, puzzling comment:
Some of those closest to her died in the early 2000s: her mother, her brother Joe and [her friend] Una Collins.
I do think that this book is good but could well have been better. It does have a fine last chapter titled "Shelagh, Take a Bow," which deals principally with Shelagh Delaney's legacy. Her work helped advance the issues of classism, poverty, and female empowerment. I will conclude with two passages from this chapter:
Throughout her life, Shelagh resisted the stereotypes to which women were meant to conform. She did this not least as a lone parent who was able both to enjoy motherhood and write about the losses it brought, as a lover determined to maintain her independence, and in her celebration of women's friendship. She was also clear that a woman should not be defined by a single event, whether passing the eleven-plus, writing a play, walking down the aisle or having a baby.
And:
When she enjoyed success with the screenplay of Dance with a Stranger, the media claimed they'd known she was a great writer all along. It was more palatable to peddle this myth than to admit that women like Shelagh had changed the world.
January 9, 2021
If you went to a British school in a certain period then you will likely be familiar with the first play by Delaney, written when she was 19 years old. The play was a staple of the British school curriculum for some time.
In this fantastic biography, Todd places Delaney in the context of time and place. Not only as a young female playwright in the 60s but also in terms of class, culture, politics and the north - south divide.
This is also a fun book to read. Delaney didn’t believe in marriage or housework and the stories from her friends make her sound witty and fun to be around. The sadness comes not from Delaneys life, which was full and fulfilling, but only from the absence of anyone like her since. The days of working class writers being given a voice that didn’t involve denigrating the class they came from, seem really far away. Delaney kicked the door open, but due to the continuing problems of class, money and industry contacts, not many others were able to walk through.
January 4, 2020
Fascinating, well-researched study of a rare and valuable voice in the 1950s British New Wave of theatre, full of insight into Delaney's personal character with invaluable social context. Above all else, a warm portrait of an artist who desired success on her own terms and refused to compromise or do what was expected.
September 12, 2022
an incredibly interesting and enlightening biography of shelagh delaney - after watching ‘a taste of honey’ a few years ago, i knew it was special and introduced me to the british kitchen sink drama genre that i have grown to love.
reading about shelagh’s experiences with sexism, misogyny and classism during the 50s and 60s was fascinating - not only to see how she coped with the media scrutiny of her writing and breaking into the film and theatre industry, but also reading about her immense love of the theatre, female friendships that she nurtured her whole life and the adoration of her home city <3
reading about shelagh’s experiences with sexism, misogyny and classism during the 50s and 60s was fascinating - not only to see how she coped with the media scrutiny of her writing and breaking into the film and theatre industry, but also reading about her immense love of the theatre, female friendships that she nurtured her whole life and the adoration of her home city <3
December 4, 2023
“Shelagh Delaney is a reminder that what goes on in the wings explains everything that happens centre stage.” This is an exceptional biography which puts this remarkable writer in context and counters claims that her life after the early success of 'A Taste of Honey' was a failure.
Read
February 20, 2024So cool
I ❤️ manchester
I ❤️ manchester
November 1, 2024
If you enjoy stories of radical working class women, the power of fringe theatre and the arts- this is a great biography!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews