Lost and Found: An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean, written and edited by Alison Donnell, with contributions by Chris Campbell, Ronald Cummings Marta Fernández Campa, Joanne C Hillhouse, Aeron MacHattie, Winsome Minott, Nalini Mohabir, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and Jeremy Poynting. London and Trafalgar: Papillote Press, 2025. ISBN: 978-1739130312. 300 pp. Paperback.
When the Jamaican writer Vera Bell (b. 1904) died in 1984, her death was not publicly noted, either in Jamaica or in the UK, where she and her husband had moved in 1955. Yet Bell is a poet whose work has been widely anthologised, whose well-known poem “Ancestor on the Auction Block” (1942) was quoted by Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller in her 2014 Emancipation Day address, and whose career culminated in an experimental long poem, Ogog (1971), recently described by Jason R. Marley as “a poetic novel” which aims “to reimagine a human civilisation free from colonial domination”’. Bell was also the first female chief clerk in the engineering department of the Jamaican Water Commission, and, through her friendship with Edna Manley, was part of the wider political, social and cultural networks of the early PNP. Her first published writings were the short stories she was commissioned to produce for Public Opinion in the 1940s, and she went on to publish her short fiction and poetry in Focus and The Gleaner. Bell’s 1944 pantomime Soliday and the Wicked Bird has been called “the first one that was really Jamaican” (in part because of its inclusion of Anancy), and her story “The Immigrants” was broadcast on the BBC’s Caribbean Voices in 1956. After migrating to Britain in the mid-1950s, Bell, like Beryl Gilroy, became involved in challenging how children of Caribbean ancestry were treated in, and represented by, the British education system. She was, Alison Donnell writes, “a writer and literary influencer at a foundational moment for Jamaican writing [who merits] a place in any future literary histories of the nationalist era….” And yet Bell was “seemingly unrecognised as a writer in her own lifetime, and “the fullness of [her] career is yet to be attended to in detail”.
In many ways Bell is exemplary of the “lost and neglected writers” recovered and showcased in Donnell’s Lost and Found: An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean, compiled and largely composed by Donnell. Some, the lost, as Donnell calls them, were well-known in their day and have subsequently fallen out of public and critical view, while others, the neglected, never received the attention that their works warranted. The reasons for these literary losses, and this critical neglect, are part of the story that Donnell tells here about 20th-century Caribbean writing, and the ways it comes to us now, in the 21st century.
Donnell is a foundational and inspirational figure in the field of Caribbean literary studies as it stands today. Across her career, she has been part of a generation of scholars who have worked to expand and reorient how we think about modern Caribbean literature—particularly that from the first half of the 20th century. Her work has always been rooted in painstaking and patient archival research, and her aim has been to change how we think about histories and canons of Caribbean writing.
Donnell’s authoritative Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (2006) laid the groundwork for much critical work being done today on modern Caribbean writers. In this book, Donnell argues that dominant narratives about the emergence of nationalist Caribbean literatures through a mid-20th-century London-based (and largely male) “boom” had obscured from critical attention much pre-1950s Caribbean writing which could not be “folded neatly into the pages of a nationalist teleology”. Ten years earlier, in their influential Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (1996), Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh had invited readers to reevaluate Caribbean literature, presenting the works of a number of then lesser-known writers, including Una Marson, J.E. Clare McFarlane and Bell, alongside texts by better-known greats of Caribbean literature—working “against the consolidation of the few (writers) which has led to the neglect of the many”. And, in the last two decades, Donnell has published numerous books, essays, chapters, and articles which have continued her significant contribution to the study of multiple aspects of Caribbean literature and culture.
In Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature, Donnell links prevailing critical narratives about the development of cultural nationalism to a lack of curiosity in archival work, or in looking beyond existing dominant canons, on the part of many late-20th-century critics. In contrast, her own aim in this book is “to try to open the archive of pre-1950 writings that the vast majority of literary histories simply do not want to reckon with”. One might say that Donnell’s whole career has been the work of opening that archive—and, through this, of expanding those literary histories.
Lost and Found is a culmination of this work. A collection of 26 biographical and critical introductions to Caribbean writers whom you have probably not heard of—and whose work Donnell will persuade you of the compelling value of, from Phyllis Shand Allfrey to Zee Edgell. All were born between 1892 and 1942. Women writers are particularly well-represented (making up 17 of the 25 included individuals), no doubt because it is they who have suffered most from patterns of critical neglect—and the anglophone Caribbean is well-covered geographically, with writers from Antigua, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad. This book is intended as an entry point for readers unfamiliar with Caribbean writing and literary history of the early to mid-20th century beyond the well-trodden ground of Claude McKay, CLR James, Louise Bennett, Vic Reid, Roger Mais, Sam Selvon, et al. And, although some of the writers included here are better known than others, I suspect that very few readers will have encountered more than a few of them before. Eileen Hall, Barbara Jones, W.G. Ogilvie, Edwina Melville, Eula Redhead, Ada Quayle, Inez Knibb Sibley, Monica Skeete, Claude Thompson—these are not familiar names to many of us.
In a sense, this is a group intellectual biography—a portrait of a particular generation and of a dispersed, diverse and incalculably rich literary moment. This was a generation of writers marked not only by great energy in literary production, but also in a multitude of other fields: Vera Bell’s work for the Jamaican water board; Barbara Jones’ as a plant geneticist; Vivian Virtue’s as a civil servant; Monica Skeete’s as an educator. This was, as Norval Edwards puts it, “the foundational generation” in more senses than one—and a generation for whom, as Donnell writes, “the project of writing creatively was intimately connected to building localised imaginaries and closing the gap between the everyday lived reality of Caribbean places and people and the ‘literary”’.
The work of W.G. Ogilvie (1923–1992), for example, “represented how the dynamics of class, gender and racialised social structures impacted on Jamaican lives during three monumental decades of the island’s history, from 1938 to 1973, as national, decolonial and postcolonial struggles for sovereignty unfolded”. His two 1953 novels, Cactus Village and The Ghost Bank (both published by the Pioneer Press), depict in detail the social, emotional and economic dynamics of Jamaican rural life “from the rituals of ninth night and banana day to the swift and severe punishment for a man caught thieving from his own neighbours”. Ogilvie was deeply aware of the significance for Jamaica of the historical moment at which he was writing, and he saw literature as playing a key part in shaping how the nation imagined itself as it moved towards independence: “We are ancestors at a very important point of our national history…. We must show our descendants the road we have travelled, in order that they may have some notion of whither they are going…. I have sought to paint life and people as they were”. These novels continued the work begun by his numerous short stories, published in venues such as Public Opinion and The West Indian Review from the 1930s onwards, which gave voice to the continuing colonial injustices faced by Black Jamaicans—and, in stories such as “Half a Fork” (1950), emphasised the need for solidarity in the face of capitalist imperialism. It is almost unbelievable, therefore, that Ogilvie and his works have been so completely lost to Jamaican and Caribbean literary history—and Donnell suggests that this may have been due to the unassailable influence of London-based publishing networks on Caribbean literature in this period. A mid-20th-century Jamaican writer who lived on the island and was published by a Kingston-based publisher is, ironically, far less likely to have her works read today than writers whose works were published elsewhere.
The Trinidadian poet Barbara Jones (1936–1969), in contrast, seems to have been on the cusp of greater literary recognition when she died at the age of 32. Jones was a plant geneticist who studied in Trinidad and the US (at Cornell) before becoming a professor at McGill University in Montreal. Jones described herself as a “geneticist by vocation, poetess by avocation”, and she wrote and performed poetry alongside her successful scientific career. She was also a key figure in 1960s Black Montreal—writing and speaking about anti-Black racism in Canada—and she was involved in organising the 1968 Congress of Black Writers in Montreal. Jones’ main published work was the irresistibly titled collection Among the Potatoes (1969), written during her PhD (which focused on the breeding habits of wild potatoes). This work is available electronically and rewards close attention. Donnell describes the “strongly articulated women’s poetics” of Jones’s work, and notes the depiction of “domestic pleasure” in Jones’ poem “The Laundromat”, in which washing machines “shake/ great orgasms/ of cleanliness”. Jones was also clearly deeply engaged with the 1960s civil rights movement in the US, and her poem “Mixed Emotions” responds to the 1965 Selma marches: “let now the black man free/ let know the white man free/ from those he f---ed and sucked/ and kept beneath his feet”. At the time of her death Jones was working on a collection that has yet to be published. She also left behind a number of seemingly lost works, including the collection Mango Season (1968). Donnell forcefully demonstrates the significance of Jones’ life and work to a number of literary movements and moments, and her appearance here hopefully marks the beginning of Jones receiving some of the recognition which was denied to her in her lifetime.
Monica Skeete (1923–1997), who was born in Grenada and moved to Barbados as a child, had numerous poems and short stories published and broadcast between the 1940s and 1970s. Her first published work was a poem, “Two Pigs Going to the Slaughter”, in Bim in 1946, and almost all of her known short stories were subsequently published in the magazine. Skeete’s writing drew on her experience as a teacher, in Barbados and London, and a number of her stories explore the diasporic experience of migration to the UK, and, in some cases, a return to the Caribbean. Her story “Larry” (1978) follows a teenager’s negotiation of the limited opportunities offered by the English educational system—and starkly registers the harms and hostilities endured by children of the Windrush generation. “The Return” (1960) tells the story of a middle-aged woman’s alienating return to her Barbados, “home”, four decades after leaving as a child: “She hated herself; hated illusion, memory, all that had contributed to the big deception with which she had smugly surrounded her ego all these years. She had been old enough to remember. She had known and yet—this.”
Donnell suggests that Skeete’s “stories can be read productively alongside those of Lamming and Selvon”, noting that “if it were not for the distance set between them by the production and marketing strategies of educational and literary publishers in the 1960s and 1970s, they would likely have been enjoyed by Caribbean adult readers and discussed by Caribbean literary critics in the same way”. Skeete’s work, like that of a number of the other women writers included in Lost and Found, has been widely anthologised in school textbooks. One might think that this would have kept her work in the public eye, but, as Donnell notes, it has instead contributed to her “critical neglect”, because such books “have not commonly been regarded as suitable sources by literary critics”. Donnell’s archival method of seeking out literary works by Caribbean writers in locations ‘beyond scholarly sight”—textbooks, school anthologies, Christmas annuals, little magazines, newspapers, radio archives—is revelatory, yielding a wealth of writing and writers which will reshape understandings of Caribbean literary history. It should also reshape approaches to literary recovery work and archival research, both in studies of Caribbean literature and beyond. How many lost and neglected writers might there be in school textbooks from other parts of the world, for instance, waiting to be found?
Lost and Found concludes with a hefty bibliography of all of the known creative literature published by each of the featured writers. This will be invaluable to future researchers, and, as Donnell notes, should ideally lay the groundwork for many further critical studies and acts of literary recovery. Indeed, Donnell points to immediate work that might be done by current researchers in her “X” chapter, the title pointing to “mid-twentieth century Caribbean women writers still unfound”, and which includes lists of over a hundred women whose work featured on the BBC’s Caribbean Voices programme, and in Bim, The Beacon, Kyk-Over-Al, Focus, and Poesy Anthologies between 1931 and 1973, but whose works remain “unexplored”.