Una Maud Victoria Marson (6 February 1905 – 6 May 1965)[1] was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes.

Her biographer Delia Jarrett-Macauley described her (in The Life of Una Marson, 1905–1965) as the first "Black British feminist to speak out against racism and sexism in Britain".

[3] British civil rights leader Billy Strachan credited Una Marson with educating him on political and racial issues.

After leaving Hampton, she found work in Kingston as a volunteer social worker and used the secretarial skills, such as stenography, she had learned in school, her first job being with the Salvation Army.

Her years there taught her journalism skills as well as influencing her political and social opinions and inspired her to create her own publication; in 1928, she became Jamaica's first female editor, and publisher of her own magazine, The Cosmopolitan, which printed articles on feminist topics, local social issues and workers' rights, and was aimed at a young, middle-class Jamaican audience.

In 1930, Marson published her first collection of poems, entitled Tropic Reveries, that dealt with love and nature with elements of feminism.

Also in 1931, she wrote her first play, At What a Price, about a Jamaican girl who moves from the country into the city of Kingston to work as a stenographer and falls in love with her white male boss.

[8] She stayed in Peckham, south-east London, at the home of Harold Moody, who the year before had founded civil-rights organisation The League of Coloured Peoples.

[14] In this period, Marson not only continued to write about women's roles in society, but also put into the mix the issues faced by black people who lived in England.

In July 1933, she wrote a poem called "Nigger" that was published in the League of Coloured Peoples' journal, The Keys, on which she worked in an editorial capacity and became Editor for in 1935.

[16] Marson herself had been affected by the stereotype of superior white beauty; her biographer tells us that within months of her arrival in Britain she "stopped straightening her hair and went natural".

This play shows how the main character is a "strong heroine" for being able to "force herself to return to London" in order to finish her education there.

Critics such as Ivy Baxter said that "Pocomania was a break in tradition because it talked about a cult from the country", and, as such, it represented a turning point in what was acceptable on the stage.

Through this show, Marson met people such as J. E. Clare McFarlane, Vic Reid, Andrew Salkey, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jomo Kenyatta, Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, Amy Garvey, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Pankhurst, Winifred Holtby, Paul Robeson, John Masefield, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Tambimuttu and George Orwell.

[25] Marson's radio programme, Caribbean Voices, was subsequently produced by Henry Swanzy, who took over after she returned to Jamaica.

Waters states that Marson was a secretary for the Pioneer Press, a publishing company in Jamaica for Jamaican authors.

The couple are reported to have divorced, allowing Marson to travel to England, Israel, then back to Jamaica; following a heart attack, she died aged 60 in May 1965,[28] at St. Josephs Hospital, Kingston, and was buried on 10 May at the Half-Way-Tree Parish Cemetery.

[33] Denise deCaires Narain has suggested that Marson was overlooked because poetry concerning the condition and status of women was not important to audiences at the time the works were produced.

[citation needed] Marson's poetry was included in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

[16] In 1998, Delia Jarrett-Macauley published the original full-length biography The Life of Una Marson, 1905–1965 (Manchester University Press, reprinted 2010).

[36] In 2022, Lenny Henry's production company, Douglas Road Productions, made a television documentary entitled Una Marson, Our Lost Caribbean Voice, broadcast on BBC Two television, in which Delia Jarrett-Macauley asks: "How could we have let someone of Una Marson's calibre just disappear?