This brought an invitation to join the Royal Court Writers Group in 1958, when its members included Edward Bond, Ann Jellicoe, John Arden, William Gaskill and Arnold Wesker.

[8] Pearson won the Corporation of London Festival Playwright's Prize in 1962 and was performed under the title The Lay Off at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Pearson/The Lay Off is a modern reworking of Piers Plowman,[7] and an early example of Duffy's inclusion of black characters in prominent roles and her opposition to racism.

[14] While many reviewers dwelt on its vivid depiction of a working-class childhood, Duffy also emphasised that her goal was to show the influences that could form a writer and those that could encourage a preference for same-sex love.

[15] Duffy's first openly gay novel was The Microcosm (1966), set in and around the famous lesbian Gateways Club in London (renamed the House of Shades).

It was the first to depict a wide range of contrasting gay women of different ages, classes and ethnicities – and historical periods – to make a point that "there are dozens of ways of being queer.

The Single Eye (1964) has a talented photographer gradually finding that his wife has become his rival, a restriction that holds back his life and his art, so that for the sake of his creativity and identity he must leave her.

All these plays had contemporary settings, but drew thematically on Greek or Roman myths (the Bacchae, children of Uranus, Narcissus, Venus and Diana).

Afterword, a witty two-hander about a writer under pressure from a benefits officer (a response to Vaclav Havel's play Conversation) was performed by Manchester University Drama Society in 1983.

[29] Wounds (1969) creates a mosaic of London life by interweaving the voices of a range of characters, including a black mother, a local politician and a gay theatre director, whose lives contrast with the uplifting experience of two passionate lovers, whose encounters recur through the book.

The lives of a professor, Emery, and a self-educated, homeless eccentric Meepers, twine around "Queen's" (a fictionalised version of King's College), interspersed with narratives of Londoners of various periods, including 14th-century prostitutes and Stone Age hunters.

Londoners is also inspired by Dante's Inferno and draws parallels with Villon's medieval Paris; it is also notable for depicting gay pubs and characters.

Restitution (1998) (long-listed for the Booker Prize), eventually brings past and present together, as a young London woman gradually finds her identity unexpectedly altered by events in Nazi Germany half a century before.

Some of Duffy's novels deploy the storytelling techniques of thrillers, including I want to go to Moscow (1973), Housespy (1978), Occam's Razor (1991), Alchemy (2004), The Orpheus Trail (2009) and In Times Like These (2013).

The Microcosm makes the case for acceptance of lesbians; Gor Saga challenges assumptions about the gulf between humans and other species; In Times Like These warns of dangers in possible Scottish independence and in withdrawal of England and Wales from the European Union.

Scarborough Fear (written under a pseudonym in 1982) is a horror story with a modern setting and Gothic elements, engaging its young narrator in a psychological battle for survival.

Duffy's literary biography of Aphra Behn (1977) led to rediscovery of the 17th-century playwright, the first woman to earn a living by writing, and established fresh facts about her life.

Duffy's other non-fiction includes The Erotic World of Faery (1972), a Freudian study of eroticism in faery fantasy literature; Inherit the Earth, (1979) a social history of her family and their roots in Thaxstead, Essex; a biography of the composer Henry Purcell (1995); and a historical survey of how myths of English identity came to develop: England: The Making of the Myth (2001).

She joined the Royal Court writers' group at a time when the social realist school of such playwrights as John Osborne and Arnold Wesker was transforming British drama.

Some of her plays have been described as "anarchic... dealing with taboo subjects... 'total theater' reminiscent of the ideas of Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet, employing Brechtian techniques.

Duffy's affinity to London, present and past, and its cosmopolitan inhabitants often features in her writing,[37] which celebrates diversity, regardless of class, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or species.

At the 1988 TUC conference as President of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, she succeeded with a motion deploring the passing of Section 28 "as an infringement of the basic right to free speech and expression".

Their campaign for Public Lending Right (annual payments to authors based on public-library loans of their books) succeeded legally in 1979 after support for it at the 1978 TUC conference.

[48] "For almost as long as she has been writing for a living, Maureen Duffy has worked to protect the rights of writers, which have been jeopardised by successive changes in technology and in the book market.