Shelagh Delaney was born in Salford, the industrial city next to Manchester, in 1938. She left school at sixteen and worked in a shop, an office and a factory. One night, the story goes, she went to the theater to see a well-made play by a famous playwright, came home thinking she could do better, and sat down and started writing.

The play she wrote was A Taste of Honey. Its heroine, Jo, is a teenage girl living in a run-down flat with her careless, funny mother, Helen. When Helen goes off with a new man, Jo has a brief romance with a Black sailor, finds herself pregnant, and sets up house with Geoffrey, a gentle young art student who is gay. Nothing like it had been seen on the British stage, where working-class girls, and Black and gay characters, were rarely more than jokes. Delaney wrote them as people.

She sent the play to Joan Littlewood, whose Theatre Workshop in east London was the most adventurous company in the country, and it opened at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in May 1958. Delaney was nineteen. The play moved to the West End and then to Broadway, and in 1961 it became a film starring Rita Tushingham, with a screenplay by Delaney and the director Tony Richardson. It was part of a new wave of plays and films about ordinary lives in the north of England, and she was its youngest voice.

Delaney went on to write another play, The Lion in Love, a book of stories, Sweetly Sings the Donkey, and screenplays for films including Charlie Bubbles and Dance with a Stranger. But A Taste of Honey is the one that lasted.

It found an unexpected champion in Morrissey of the Smiths, who borrowed lines from it for his songs and put Delaney’s photograph on the covers of their records. He said that at least half of his reason for writing could be blamed on her. She died in 2011.