Hilary Bailey (19 September 1936 â 11 January 2017) was a British writer, critic and editor. She edited volumes 7âÂÂ10 of the New Worlds Quarterly science-fiction series, and was co-author of The Black Corridor (1969) with Michael Moorcock, to whom she was married from 1962 to 1978. She was the author of numerous other works of fiction, including Polly Put the Kettle On (1975), Mrs Mulvaney (1978), All the Days of My Life (1984) and Hannie Richards, Or, The Intrepid Adventures of a Restless Wife (1985), in addition to a 1987 biography of Vera Brittain. Bailey's work characteristically has a focus on women, including sequels and reimaginings of classic novels by Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë.
Hilary Bailey was born in Hayes, Bromley, Kent, England. She attended Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was a founder-member of the Cambridge University Women's Union.
Bailey's books include Polly Put the Kettle On (1975), Mrs Mulvaney (1978), Hannie Richards (1985) and All the Days of My Life (1984), with a heroine who suffers the fate of all women who step away from what is expected of them. She wrote a biography of Vera Brittain, and sequels to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (the 1997 novel Mrs Rochester) and to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, with a novel called Miles and Flora, which takes place some time after the original and resurrects one of the main characters.
As a critic, Bailey reviewed chiefly for The Guardian, she was active in the so-called New Wave of science fiction and edited volumes 7âÂÂ10 of the New Worlds Quarterly series, and was co-author of The Black Corridor (1969) with Michael Moorcock, to whom she was married from 1962 to 1978.
Two of Bailey's science fiction short stories appeared in anthologies edited by Terry Carr. The anthology titles are On Our Way to the Future (1970) and Universe 5 (1974). She was a prominent and much-anthologised writer associated with the science fiction New Wave.
She was working on the final edit of North Sea Island, the sequel to her dystopian novel Fifty-First State (2008), when she died.
Bailey had three children, Sophie, Kate and Max, as well as three grandchildren Alex, Tom and Bobby.
The archive of Hilary Bailey is held at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.