Clemence Dane (aka Winifred Ashton) is the ‘invisible woman’ of British 20th century culture: a prolific and popular writer and artist, she was described by her great friend Noel Coward as ‘a wonderful unique mixture of artist, writer, games mistress, poet and egomaniac.’

For many years, she lived in two decorated caravans in a field near the Midhurst sandpits, West Sussex, and was a regular visitor to Brighton.

In late 2007, I was ‘headhunted’ by agents Pollinger Ltd, literary executors of the published work of Clemence Dane (née Winifred Ashton), to write the first biography. A fruitful period of research resulted in the production of a detailed proposal in 2008 but, with publishers increasingly focusing on ‘celebrity’ autobiographies, it proved impossible then to get a funded commission.

However, since then, I’ve continued to collect material about Clemence Dane’s life and work and, in November 2014, she was featured in my ‘Queer Perspectives’ event at the National Portrait Gallery, alongside Noel Coward. The enormous interest in her expressed by the audience on that occasion helped consolidate my long-held belief that she was ideal material for a quirky, witty show that was as eccentric as its subject.

Now, I am enormously grateful to Arts Council England for funding my new one-woman play, Wanting the Moon, and am looking forward with great pleasure and excitement to bringing Clemence Dane ‘back to life’ and introducing her to the audience she deserves.

The title of the show comes from an interview she gave late in life: ‘I want all the Duke Ellington records. I want new covers for the chairs. I want a Frigidaire. I want sympathy. I want the lost ending to Edwin Drood. That’s all, I think. Oh, I forgot — I have often wanted the moon…’

What made her so special? Well, amongst other things:

• She was the first British woman screenwriter ever to win an Oscar — in 1947, for Perfect Strangers, for Best Writing, Original Story.

• Her first novel, Regiment of Women (1917), about forbidden desire in a girls’ school, was inspired by her own experiences as both pupil and teacher in a girls’ school, and was the book that directly inspired her friend Radclyffe Hall to write The Well of Loneliness.

• She was the inspiration for eccentric medium Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. He told a friend that he would ‘by every hint he can devise, he make the jolly Arcati a raving English sapphist of the old school.’ Dane and Coward were lifelong friends, and he would always get her to read his scripts and books first for her opinion.

Yet her name and achievements are almost forgotten today. And, as if all that wasn’t enough, she was a highly-regarded script doctor for stage and screen, called on by Hollywood and UK producers and directors. She co-wrote Garbo’s version of Anna Karenina. Her first play, A Bill of Divorcement, was a Broadway hit starring Sapphic stage legend Katherine Cornell, who had a lavender marriage with gay director Guthrie McClintic. David O Selznick said it was ‘one of the most perfectly constructed and best-written plays of the last twenty-five years’ and made it into a film which launched the screen career of its female lead — Katharine Hepburn.

She created and cultivated the highly influential Tavistock Circle (named after Dane’s Covent Garden flat) which included many LGBT writers, actors, artists, composers and designers, including Noel Coward, Richard Addinsell and his partner Victor Steibel, Ivor Novello, Binkie Beaumont. Arthur Marshall and Gladys Calthrop. These friends delighted in her much-loved and oft-quoted seemingly innocent outbursts — what Noel Coward called ‘Winifred’s garden of bloomers’.

To hear more about Clemence Dane’s extraordinary life and work, join me at Jubilee and Worthing Libraries:

Tuesday 24 November, Jubilee Library, Jubilee St, Brighton BN1 1GE

Doors open 5.30pm, event starts at 5.45pm prompt.

Tickets £3, bookable at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/wanting-the-moon-clemence-dane-by-rose-collis-tickets-19279613844

Tuesday 1 December, Worthing Library, Richmond Road, Worthing, BN11 1HD

Event starts at 12.10pm. Free.