Laurence Housman

Writer and playwright, born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, WC England, UK, the brother of A E Housman. He studied art at Lambeth and South Kensington, and attracted attention by his illustrations of Meredith's poem, ‘Jump-to-Glory Jane’. He is best known for his Little Plays of St Francis (1922) and his Victorian biographical ‘chamber plays’, such as Angels and Ministers (1921) and Victoria Regina (1937). His autobiography, The Unexpected Years (1937), reveals a romantic Victorian figure, a Conservative radical who espoused pacificism and votes for women.

Laurence Housman (July 18, 1865 - February 20, 1959) was an English playwright. Housman, Laurence Housman was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. After education at local schools, he went with his sister Clemence to study art at the Lambert School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London.

Housman's first success came with the novel An Englishwoman's Love-letters (1900), published anonymously. Some of Housman's plays caused scandals because of depiction of biblical characters and living members of the Royal House on stage, and many of them were only played privately until the subsequent relaxation of theatrical censorship.

Housman was also a committed socialist and pacifist and founded the Men's League for Women's Suffrage with Henry Nevinson and Henry Brailsford in 1907. A prolific writer with around a hundred published works to his name, his output covers all kinds of literature from socialist and pacifist pamphlets to children's stories.

In 1945 he opened Housmans Bookshop,in Shaftesbury Avenue, London, founded in his honour by the Peace Pledge Union, of which he was a Sponsor. In 1959, shortly after his death, the shop removed to 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX, where it is still a prime source of literature on pacifism and other radical approaches to living.