Yvonne Helene Kapp (née Mayer) (17 April 1903 – 22 June 1999) was a British writer and political activist. Kapp also wrote under the name Yvonne Cloud.

Biography

Yvonne Hélène Mayer was born on 17 April 1903 at 170

Tulse Hill Tulse Hill is a district in the London Borough of Lambeth in South London that sits on Brockwell Park. It is approximately five miles from Charing Cross and is bordered by Brixton, Dulwich, Herne Hill, Streatham and West Norwood. History The ar ...

, London, into a Jewish immigrant family, daughter of Max Alfred Mayer (1871–1948) and his wife Clarisse Fanny Bielefeld (1878–1960). She started work with a brief stint on the ''

Evening Standard The ''Evening Standard'', formerly ''The Standard'' (1827–1904), also known as the ''London Evening Standard'', is a local free daily newspaper in London, England, published Monday to Friday in tabloid format. In October 2009, after be ...

'' and moved on to the ''

Sunday Times ''The Sunday Times'' is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, whi ...

''. She joined the

Communist Party of Great Britain The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPG ...

and visited the USSR. She worked on behalf of Jewish and Basque refugees. She was married to Edmund Kapp from 1922 to 1930. In 1938 she was co-author, with Margaret Mynatt, of ''British Policy and the Refugees'', not published until 1968. From 1941 to 1947 worked for the

Amalgamated Engineering Union The Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) was a major United Kingdom, British trade union. It merged with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union to form the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union in 1992. History ...

as a research officer. Subsequently, she worked for the Medical Research Council, and later as a translator, and writing her ''magnum opus'', a life of

Eleanor Marx Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx (16 January 1855 – 31 March 1898), sometimes called Eleanor Aveling and known to her family as Tussy, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a socialist activist who sometimes worked as a ...

. She died on 22 June 1999.

Bibliography

* ''British Policy and the Refugees'', 1968 (with Margaret Mynatt). * ''Eleanor Marx'', 2 vols, Lawrence & Wishart, 1972–6. * ''Time Will Tell'', Verso, 2003 (posthumous). Kapp also co-translated a volume of

Bertold Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...

's short stories. * 1983. ''Short Stories: 1921–1946''. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Trans. Yvonne Kapp, Hugh Rorrison and Antony Tatlow. London and New York: Methuen. .

References

External links

Obituary in The Independent
"Marxism in vogue"
Obituary in Issue 233 of ''SOCIALIST REVIEW''. Published September 1999
Obituary
in ''The Guardian'' by Eric Hobsbawm
Yvonne Kapp Papers
in the TUC Library Collections, London Metropolitan University * 1903 births 1999 deaths British Jewish writers British communists 20th-century English women writers 20th-century English writers {{UK-writer-stub