Melissa Benn

Melissa Ann Benn (born 1957) is a British journalist and writer. She is the daughter of Tony Benn and Caroline Benn, and a member of the political Benn family. Biography Benn was born in Hammersmith, London to politician Tony Benn and writer-educationalist Caroline Benn. She has three brothers, Joshua Benn, Hilary Benn and Stephen Benn, 3rd Viscount Stansgate, making her a member of the political Benn family. She attended Fox Primary School and Holland Park School and graduated with a first in History from the London School of Economics. Benn spent several years working at the National Council for Civil Liberties, as an assistant to Patricia Hewitt, later Secretary of State for Health in Tony Blair's government, and then as a researcher at the Open University, under Professor Stuart Hall, working on deaths in custody. Benn then worked as a journalist for City Limits magazine. Subsequently, she has written for other publications, including The Guardian, The London Review of Books and Marxism Today. Her first novel, Public Lives, published in 1995, was described by writer Margaret Forster as "remarkably sophisticated for a first". In 1998 Jonathan Cape published Benn's Madonna and Child: towards a modern politics of motherhood which caused some controversy. The reviewers for The Guardian and The Observer criticised the book, while the Literary Review called it "a reflective, rich and rewarding investigation into the ...conditions of mothers' lives". The Guardian featured Benn as one of a number of Britain's leading feminist writers at the time.