A main thread of the novel is the conflict between militant and moderate socialists, which finds bitter expression in the course of an unofficial strike, and during a Parliamentary election campaign.
Black Bethlehem (1947) is an unusually-structured novel, a psychological study of wartime and postwar anxieties on the battlefield and on the Home Front.
Cooper met Eileen Blair (George Orwell's wife) during the war, and is thought to have used her as the basis for the character of Ann in Black Bethlehem.
She was one of the founders of the Writers' Action Group[2] along with Brigid Brophy, Maureen Duffy, Francis King and Michael Levey and received an OBE for her work in achieving Public Lending Rights.
At a PEN Congress in Stockholm, a Swedish writer remarked of Cooper: "She is what we expect English people to be but what they so seldom are"[3] She never married.