Angela Jackson

Angela Jackson is an English historian and writer, author of various published books in English, Spanish and Catalan on the subject of the Spanish civil war. Recently she has written the Foreward and Afterword to 'Firing a Shot for Freedom: The Memoirs of Frida Stewart', published by The Clapton Press, who also recently released a new edition of Angela's classic book first published in 2002, 'British Women and the Spanish Civil War.' During her research, Angela formed close friendships with some of the women she interviewed and was fascinated by their vivid experiences of life near the front lines, their feelings about the men they met and the intense passions aroused in wartime. Angela's novel 'Warm Earth', is based on the real lives of the remarkable women she met.

Friendship with Frida (m. Knight) was to have a lasting impact on Angela's life, along with that of another interviewee, Patience Darton (m. Edney). In their conversations, Patience often spoke about her days as a nurse with the International Brigades, caring for the wounded in a cave hospital in Catalonia. After her death, Angela decided to find the cave, high in the mountains of the region known as the Priorat. Enchanted by this beautiful area and its history, Angela moved there and began new research projects. Interviews with the locals who remembered the civil war and the International Brigade volunteers led her to write 'Beyond the Battlefield: Testimony, Memory and Remembrance of a Cave Hospital in the Spanish Civil War' followed by 'At the Margins of Mayhem: Prologue and Epilogue to the Last Great Battle of the Spanish Civil War'. These were translated into Catalan and published as ‘Més enllà del camp de batalla’ (2004) and ‘Els brigadistes entre nosaltres’ (2008) by Cossetània Edicions, Valls.

When the letters Patience had written from Spain eventually came to light, Angela was able to write the first full-length biography of a nurse in the International Brigades entitled 'For us it was Heaven: The Passion, Grief and Fortitude of Patience Darton from the Spanish Civil War to Mao's China'. A selection of the excellent reviews the biography received can be seen on the web site of Sussex Academic Press.

Now living again in England, Angela is working on a second novel, a saga set in Britain and Spain which spans the years from the 1930s to the 1960s and explores the effects of changing times on the lives of two different generations of women. She is the Honorary President of 'No Jubilem la Memoria', an association she helped to found in order to recover the memory of the civil war in the Priorat.