Mona Wilson
Her father resigned from Clifton and was appointed vicar of Rochdale and archdeacon of Manchester, and on leaving Cambridge in 1896, Wilson, joining her family in the industrial north, first met labour and social conditions at close quarters.
[3] In 1899 Wilson became secretary of the League, and in the same year, commissioned by the Industrial Law Committee, she compiled a handbook of the legal regulations governing the working conditions of women employed in factories, workshops, shops, and laundries.
[3] In 1902 Wilson took part in an investigation into social conditions in West Ham in the East End of London, and in 1904, with Mary Lily Walker, she led an inquiry into housing, income, and employment in Dundee.
Her annual salary of £1,000 made her the highest-paid woman civil servant of the time and one of the first British women to receive equal pay with men.
She helped to coordinate the voluntary and professional sectors of women's social work during and just after the First World War, and took part in the early stages of establishing a ministry of health.
In 1909 under the pen name Monica Moore, she wrote a short story, "The Ordeal", printed in The Nation; it featured the miseries of mill workers.
[7] The following year she published a novel, The Story of Rosalind Retold from her Diary, a tale about of a talented woman writer and artist whose short life was divided between the arts and social work.
In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Margaret Carter describes the heroine as "a restless and haunted woman, whose fall from her galloping horse may have been her means of joining her recently deceased young son".
[11] When a revised edition was published in 1949, The Manchester Guardian commented, "Miss Wilson may have assumed rather too easily the unity of mystic, poet, and artist in Blake, but she has told his story more fully and sensibly than anyone else.
"[13] After a four-year gap Wilson's next book was a study of Sir Philip Sidney (1931), which combined a biography with literary criticism of his writings, contrasting his disciplined poetry with his elaborate and ornamented prose style.
The New York Times thought Wilson's attempt to disentangle Elizabeth's personality from her actions led to "an outline portrait made of broken lines that do not quite sufficiently explain themselves".
[16] The Spectator commented, "No one, after reading Miss Wilson's book, will fail to understand how it was that Elizabeth's reign is one of the most famous in English History, and still the most glamorous of all.
The prose included excerpts from Rasselas, A Journey to the Western Isles, the Letter to Lord Chesterfield, the preface and plan of the Dictionary, Lives of the Poets and essays.
