Amber Blanco White (née Reeves, 1887-1981), was a socialist with close ties to Fabianism, having founded the Cambridge University Fabian Society (CUFS) with Ben Keeling in 1909. She worked in the Women’s Wages Department at the Ministry of Munitions, stood for Parliament as a Labour candidate for Hendon (1931, 1935), lectured in philosophy and psychology at Morley College, London for 37 years and published books on ethics and economics, alongside four novels.

In the year of publication (and inscription), Blanco White began lecturing in philosophy and psychology at Morley College, London. She supplemented this income with research on banking and money for the New Statesman, which culminated in a book, The Nationalisation of Banking (1934).

Blanco White’s early affair with H. G. Wells “figured vividly in the contemporary imagination and [according to Margaret Drabble] helped to pioneer changed attitudes towards sexual relations.” (Drabble, 2005). They had a daughter, Anna-Jane; the affair also spawned two literary offspring: Wells’ New Woman novel, Ann Veronica (1909, the year of Anna-Jane’s birth), whose namesake is based on ABW, as is Amanda in his The Research Magnificent (1915).

E. E. Cummings' autobiographical first novel is based on his experiences as an enlistee with the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France, where he openly expressed anti-war views and was arrested by the French military.

Margaret Drabble, ‘A Room of her Own,’ The Guardian (2005)
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