Brighouse described himself as "essentially a regional writer," but although he is indeed normally associated with the Manchester School of playwrights, his work transcends the geographical area from which it sprang, and has been successful on both sides of the Atlantic. He has left us a larger body of playable works than the acclaim for his one acknowledged masterpiece, Hobson's Choice (1915), would suggest: some highly readable novels, and numerous exquisite one-act plays, of which form he was a master.

Harold Brighouse was born in Eccles, Lancashire. His father was John Southworth Brighouse, a cotton spinner and prominent Liberal, and his mother was the sister of Edwin Harrison, the brilliant Oxford student whose premature death in 1899 caused many to mourn the reputation he might have made. Brighouse himself won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, where he was contemporary with Gilbert Cannan and Stanley Houghton, but at nearly seventeen...