AustLit

Leonora Eyles, born Margaret Leona Pitcairn, was a feminist and socialist English writer from the first half of the twentieth century, who campaigned for the rights of working-class women and sustained friendships with Marie Stopes and other British feminists and birth control advocates. She took an assisted passage to Australia in 1907, where she met her husband, Alfred William Eyles, and declared in her autobiography that Australia had converted her to 'revolutionariness', before she returned to the UK. She lived in Australia for around three years. Her work includes fiction and non-fiction, journalism and short stories, as well as forthright, politicised sex and birth control advice. Her best-selling Commonsense About Sex was banned in Australia in 1934. Eyles is included in AustLit because her work was banned or restricted in Australia by the Federal censor.

October 2018: It appears that Leonora Eyles used the pseudonym 'Elizabeth Lomond' for the novel I Have Been Young, which some reviews believed to be a work of autobiography. It was published by Victor Gollancz Ltd in 1932. There is significant similarity between Eyles's life and the story in the 'novel'.

Records from the archive of the Victor Gollancz Ltd, held at Warwick University in the UK, show that Mrs D L Murray was paid by the company for I Have Been Young alongside her other novels and feminist works. The Wikipedia entry on Eyles determines that she married the journalist David Leslie Murray in 1928. 

Based on this evidence we have linked to works and authors.