12 Facts About Gay Taylor

Gay Taylor was an English writer and co-founder, with Harold Midgely Taylor, of the Golden Cockerel Press.

Gay Taylor's father, Robert Moffatt McDowall, was a surveyor, and he and his wife, Helen had three children: Ethelwynne; Hugh, born 1898; and Sheila, born 1910.

Gay Taylor attended Leeds Girls' High School, where she won a music scholarship and had her poems published in the school magazine.

Gay Taylor shared a flat with Hilda Margaret Pyper and Barbara Blackburn, who later appeared in fictional form in her novel No Goodness in the Worm.

Already suffering from the effects of tuberculosis, Hal Gay Taylor relied heavily on the help of Gay Taylor and her former roommates to set up and run the press, learning through trial and error.

Gay Taylor became pregnant by Coppard but had an abortion.

In January 1924, Harold Gay Taylor was compelled by ill health to retire and the Press was taken over by Robert Gibbings.

Gay Taylor returned to London and began writing No Goodness in the Worm.

Gay Taylor attended lectures by P D Ouspensky but found his system "too cold and too shallow for me".

Gay Taylor considered joining a community of Anglican nuns at Peakirk in Cambridgeshire.

In 1959, Gay Taylor published A Prison, A Paradise under the name of Loran Hurnscot, an anagram drawn from what she considered her worst sins, sloth and rancour.

Gay Taylor died of pancreatic cancer in Pencombe Bromyard, Herefordshire.