Ordinary Treasure

As a child, Laura Maw read books by authors whose experiences were sculpted by an inheritance, a family property, an expansive and shiftless day. Watching her mother clean bed-and-breakfast rooms, she longed to know the stories of writers whose lives looked more like hers.In Ordinary Treasure, she recreates the lives of four women writers who did not have a room of their own, who wrote in stolen moments at work, without the luxury of time.

How does a working-class experience shape a writer's work? How does it colour her work's reception? And how might it impact her ability to come to the page at all?

Moving from the 1950s to the 1980s, and as rich in archival detail as it is marked by lacunae and discontinuity, Ordinary Treasure is an intimate emotional biography of four women writers whose life and work was inseparable from their class.