Julia Darling

Darling was born in 1956 at 8 College Street, Winchester—the house Jane Austen died in. Her parents were John Ramsay Darling, a science teacher at Winchester College and Patricia Rosemary, who was a nurse and a Quaker. Darling later wrote about how the house's Austen connection meant they were constantly visited. She later wrote that as a teenager, she had put up anti-apartheid and pro-choice posters in her bedroom windows earning her a complaint from the Jane Austen Society. Darling attended Winchester High School for Girls and St Christopher School. One of her friends at that time was the "groovy and alternative" Robyn Hitchcock, a pupil at Winchester College. She was expelled at 15 and attended Falmouth School of Art. ==Writing career==

Darling moved to Newcastle in 1980 and began her writing career as a poet, publishing a collection entitled Small Beauties in 1988 and working with a performance group called "The Poetry Virgins". ==Personal life and death==

On 13 October 1984 Darling married Ivan Paul Sears, a trade union organiser who later changed his name to Ieuan Einion. They had two daughters. In 1990, they divorced and Darling began living with Beverley Anne Robinson. She was heavily involved in starting Proud Words, the first English lesbian and gay literary festival. Darling died of breast cancer in 2005 aged 48. ==Works==

Plays • Eating the Elephant and Other Plays (New Writing North, 2005), . Novels • Crocodile Soup (Anchor Books, 1998), • ''The Taxi Driver's Daughter'' (Viking, 2003), ; Penguin, . Poetry • Sudden Collapses in Public Places (Arc Publications, 2003), . • The Poetry Cure (Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2005), . • Apology for Absence (Arc Publications, 2005), . Short stories • Bloodlines (Panurge Publishing, 1995), . • Pearl and other stories (MayFly Press, 2018), . ==References==