Biography

- Carol Ann Duffy born December 23, 1955, Scotland

- Her poetry engaged such topics as gender and oppression, expressing them in familiar,
conversational language, making her work accessible to a variety of readers
- 2009-2019: She served as the first woman poet laureate of Great Britain
- Lived in Glasgow, Scotland until the age six, moving to Stafford, England
- Age 15: Duffy grew up attending convent schools and began publishing her poetry in
magazines
- Age 16: had an affair with the celebrated poet Adrian Henri, who was 39 at the time → lasted
for several years and led her to go to Liverpool University in 1974 in order to be near him
- Much of her concern with childhood alienation derives from the experience of being uprooted
and moved to a culture in which, with her Glasgow accent and urban background, she would
have been seen as an outsider
- Attended Liverpool University
- 1977: Graduated with a degree in philosophy, set to work publishing several books and
traveling to read and teach her poetry
- 1985: published Standing Female Nude → first collection of poems
- 1988 - 1989: Worked as a poetry critic for The Guardian and as an editor for the poetry
magazine Ambit
- 1996: Lectured in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, later became creative
director of the Writing School
- Poetry Collection
- Standing Female Nude (1985)
- The Other Country (1990)
- The World’s Wife (1999)
- Rapture (2005)
- Plays
- Take My Husband (1982)
- Little Women (1986)
- Big Boys (1986)
- Despite her early liaison with Henri, she has for many years lived with a female partner, poet
Jackie Kay
- Has a daughter, born in 1995, but the father has not been involved in her upbringing
- 1999: British media claimed Duffy had been considered for the position of poet laureate but
that Prime Minister Tony Blair feared her homosexuality would not be well received by
“middle England”
- Andrew Motion poet and author was chosen instead, later Duffy accepted the position at the
end of Motion’s term (2009), made it clear in interviews that she had agreed to become poet
laureate only because, since its inception in the 17th century, no woman had previously held
the post

Duffy’s Works
1. Context
- Best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues
- Her early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in
her verses is someone whos gender is not specified
- Meant Time (1993) and Selected Poems (1994): began writing about queer love
- The snappy sentences, and apparent simplicity of her work do not prevent her from
addressing complex philosophical issues about the function of language and the construction
of the self, or from dealing with a wide range of issues, from the effects of sexism, racism,
immigration, domestic violence, and social disaffection, to the complexities of love
- 1960s: a significant decade of British history
- Period of austerity, began during the Second World War, did not end until the early
1950s
- Revolution of mass media and mass communications
- Postcolonial Britain
- Granting of independence of India, Pakistan and Ceylon → a precursor to the
process of wholesale decolonisation (late 1950s)
- Led to two major and important changes in British society:
- mass immigration of non-European people from former colonies that
turned Britain into a multiracial society → controversial, racism
became an important part of British life
- From being a major world power, Britain slowly became a small
country in Europe, many people had difficulty in coming to terms
with Britain’s loss of importance and influence on the world stage
- Politics and Culture
- Left-wing Labour Party came to power in 1964, after 13 years of
Conservative rule, new government seemed to usher in a period of renewed
intellectual and cultural life in the country → era of The Beatles, with
outrageous fashion and personal liberation
- Widespread introduction of the contraceptive pill → women could have sex
without fear of the consequences, by the end of 1960s the sexual revolution
had swept away centuries of taboos → ‘Free love’ became popular and male
homosexuality became legal for the first time
- The hippy movement of the late 1960s seemed to promise an alternative
lifestyle that was unconventional, anti-materialist and free-thinking
- All these changes broke the stranglehold of conventional morality and class
stereotyping that for some had made life in the 1950s and early 1960s stifling
- Education
- Introduction of comprehensive schools by the Labour government
- Since 1944, British state schools had been divided into grammar schools,
which gave an academic education to those children, predominantly middle
class, who passed the 11-plus examination, and secondary modern schools,
which prepared children who failed, predominantly from the working class,
for lives as unqualified workers
- The new comprehensive schools would educate all children together and
aimed to end the socio educational divide
- They were hailed as a great piece of social engineering that would finally
remove the class divisions from British society
- Offered a serious academic education to any child who chose to take
advantage of the opportunities on offer
- Social change
- Era of pop art, mini-skirts, beat music, long hair and hallucinogenic drugs
- Feminist movement began to challenge the limitations placed upon women
 - Grammar schools offered a route to university for lower middle-class women
who would previously never have considered going to university
- Development of labour-saving domestic appliances liberated women from
domestic drudgery
- Women challenged the traditional view that their place was in the home and
chose to make careers for themselves
- The sexual revolution meant women were able to take the initiative in affairs
of the heart once they were in control of their fertility
- Feminism
- For centuries, women in European societies have enjoyed significantly fewer
human rights than men
- Responsibility for this lies with the medieval Christian Church, which
decided to blame Eve for the Fall of Mankind → allowed men to seize
control of the Church and political power in the Middle Ages
- As a wife, a woman was the property of her husband
- When societies began to move towards democracy in the 19th century, only
men were given the vote
- Women’s suffrage
- By the early 19th century, feminist movement slowly emerged
- Early 20th century: struggle for equal rights for women was forced onto the
political agenda by the suffragette movement
- Women over the age of 30 were given the vote in 1918, 1928 was when all
women had the vote on an equal footing with men
- Women’s liberation
- Women’s movement received a new impetus in the 1960s and 1970s with the
emergence of the feminist movement in the USA and elsewhere
- Writings of Germain Greer and others began to have an impact
- Magazine Spare Rib spread feminist ideas broadly, and irresistible political
pressure began to be exerted by women
- A series of legislative changes swept away some of the legal discrimination
against women, more radical feminists mounted a more fundamental
challenge against the patriarchal structure and attitudes of society
- Why should a woman adopt her husband’s surname on marriage? Why
should she change her title from Miss to Mrs to denote ownership, when a
man did not?
- Reclaiming history
- Examining the roots of established prejudices
- The Bible, classical mythology and fairy stories were all found to have
deeply embedded anti-female prejudices, and some feminists worked to
develop alternative mythologies
- Lilith, the feist first wife of Adam, was identified as an alternative to Eve;
Angela Carter rewrote traditional fairy stories from a feminist perspective
- Duffy herself has contributed to this process by revisiting a number of
biblical and mythological stories in The World’s Wife
- Duffy refers in passing to the male domination of publishing
- 1973: Virago Press was set up by a group of women with the aim of
publishing women’s writing → step towards equality of opportunity for
women writers
 - Sexism today
- Although most of the legal discrimination against women has been removed,
a significant number of contexts remain in which women are, in reality, far
from equal
- Continuing high level of violence against women committed by men
- Duffy has succeeded in combining a slightly different set of roles, as partner,
mother, poet and academic, and has in the process become one of the
best-known, most distinctive and most respected poets in UK literary circles;
she does not expect to receive any public accolades for exposing the
hypocrisies and inadequacies of the UK establishment with its patriarchal
attitudes, vested interests and ‘old boy’ networks

2. Themes
- Language and the representation of reality
- Construction of the self
- Gender issues
- Contemporary culture
- Different forms of alienation
- Oppression and social inequality

3. Languages
- Duffy writes in everyday, conversational language, making her poems appear deceptively
simple
- With this demotic style, she creates contemporary versions of traditional poetic forms
- She makes frequent use of the dramatic monologue in her exploration of different
voices and different identities
- Duffy is both serious and humorous, often writing in a mischievous, playful style
- She plays with words as she explores the way in which meaning and reality are
constructed through language
- In this, her work has been linked to postmodernism and poststructuralism →
interesting contrast between the postmortem content and the conservative forms