Writer: born Hopkinstown, Glamorgan, 7 November 1920 married 1945 Morien This last remark was typical of her forthright, but always genial manner, and her willingness to explore in her writing, from a rigorously feminist point of view, themes which provided her with opportunities to challenge the bearded orthodoxies.

'The marvellous thing about Finlay,' she said, 'was that you could say anything and people were not offended: I dealt with syphilis in one and euthanasia in another.' Among her first successes on the small screen were three episodes of Inspector Maigret, followed by a dozen of Dr Finlay's Casebook, for which, there being so few novels by A J Cronin on which to base the series, she had to devise the story-lines herself. Her first plays had been for the stage, but none of them was a hit. In between writing her books on evolutionary theory, Morgan lived on her income from television. They included treatments of Anne Frank, Madame Curie and, to great acclaim in her native Wales, The Life and Times of David Lloyd George – starring Philip Madoc as the eponymous statesman – and a television version of Richard Llewellyn's novel How Green Was My Valley.Īmong her arguments were that urbanisation is the same under capitalism and communism that market forces are now beginning to be inimical to the growth of cities that the great metropolitan centres are no longer the prime generators of wealth but are moving into a parasitical stage and that the solution to the cities' problems will have to come from outside because city-dwellers are no longer capable of addressing them. Perhaps her best-known adaptation was that of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth (1980), which reflected her own feelings about war and women's struggle for education, but she also wrote many documentaries which were widely admired for the skills she brought to the small screen.

But she earned a living by writing scripts, mainly serials and documentary dramas, for television – work for which she never received her full meed of praise. Elaine Morgan, author of the international best-seller The Descent of Woman, a feminist view of evolution, enjoyed a brief celebrity shortly after its publication in 1972, mainly on account of her brilliantly argued thesis that humans had their origins in the sea and that women are not biologically or socially inferior to men.

The descent of woman by elaine morgan