Jane Arden was a British film director, actress, singer/songwriter and poet, who gained note in the 1950s. Born in Pontypool, Monmouthshire, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She started acting in the late 1940s and writing for stage and television in the 1950s. In the 1960s, she joined movements for feminism and anti-psychiatry. She wrote a screenplay for the film Separation (1967). In the late 1960s and 1970s, she wrote for experimental theatre, adapting one work as a self-directed film, The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). In 1978 she published a poetry book. Arden committed suicide in 1982. In 2009, her feature films Separation (1967), The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979) were restored by the British Film Institute and released on DVD and Blu-ray. Her literary works are out of print.

Pontypool is a town and the administrative centre of the county borough of Torfaen, within the historic boundaries of Monmouthshire in South Wales. As of 2021, it has a population of 29,062.