Born in Bradford in 1895, Malachi Whitaker grew up among books, the daughter of a bookbinder. She began writing at an early age and by the mid-1930s was recognized as one of the finest short story writers of her time, known as "the Bradford Chekhov." And So Did I, an impressionistic memoir of a year in the late 1930s, was her last published book. For personal and critical reasons, she wrote nothing more for publication from then until her death in 1975. Her short stories have since been reissued by Carcanet and Persephone and included in dozens of anthologies.

"It is nothing if not a work of art. The excellence of And So Did I resides in its spontaneity, its distinguished and vivid imaginativeness, its delicious sureness in detail, its intimacy, its atmosphere."

• Born in Bradford in 1895, Malachi Whitaker grew up among books, the daughter of a bookbinder. She began writing at an early age and by the mid-1930s was recognized as one of the finest short story writers of her time, known as "the Bradford Chekhov." And So Did I, an impressionistic memoir of a year in the late 1930s, was her last published book. For personal and critical reasons, she wrote nothing more for publication from then until her death in 1975. Her short stories have since been reissued by Carcanet and Persephone and included in dozens of anthologies.