Angela Thirkell
Angela Margaret Mackail was born on January 30, 1890 at 27 Young Street, Kensington Square, London. Her grandfather was Sir Edward Burne-Jones the pre-Raphaelite painter and partner in the design firm of Morris and Company for whom he designed many stained glass windows - seven of which are in St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean, West Sussex. Her grandmother was Georgiana Macdonald, one of a precocious family which included among others, Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, and Rudyard Kipling. Angela's brother, Denis Mackail, was also a prolific and successful novelist. Angela's mother, Margaret Burne-Jones, married John Mackail - an administrator at the Ministry of Education and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Angela married Jam
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Daphne du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the middle of three daughters of prominent actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel, née Beaumont. In many ways her life resembles a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, her paternal grandfather was author and Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, who created the character of Svengali in the 1894 novel Trilby, and her mother was a maternal niece of journalist, author, and lecturer Comyns Beaumont. She and her sisters were indulged as a children and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. Her elder sister, Angela du Maurier, also became a writer, and her younger sist
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O. Douglas
Born Anna Masterton Buchan, younger sister to the statesman & prolific novelist John Buchan. She began writing in 1911, and published 12 novels and a personal memoir of her brother before her death. Her novels are humorous domestic fiction, focusing on the lives of families in Scotland. Her autobiography was published posthumously, in 1960.
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William Maxwell
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American novelist, and fiction editor at the New Yorker. He studied at the University of Illinois and Harvard University. Maxwell wrote six highly acclaimed novels, a number of short stories and essays, children's stories, and a memoir, Ancestors (1972). His award-winning fiction, which is increasingly seen as some of the most important of the 20th Century, has recurring themes of childhood, family, loss and lives changed quietly and irreparably. Much of his work is autobiographical, particularly concerning the loss of his mother when he was 10 years old growing up in the rural Midwest of America and the house where he liv -
Mildred A. Wirt
Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson (aka: Mildred Benson)
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Writing under Stratemeyer Syndicate pen name Carolyn Keene from 1929 to 1947, she contributed to 23 of the first 25 originally published Nancy Drew mysteries. She was one of 28 individuals who helped produce the Syndicate's Nancy Drew mystery books from 1929 to 1984.
Edward Stratemeyer hired Benson in 1926. She was paid a flat fee of $125 for the first Nancy Drew book written using an outline provided by the syndicate.
Other pseudonyms: Frank Bell, Joan Clark, Julia K. Duncan, Alice B. Emerson, Frances K. Judd, Don Palmer, Helen Louise Thorndyke, Dorothy West, Ann Wirt -
Nancy Mitford
Nancy Mitford, styled The Hon. Nancy Mitford before her marriage and The Hon. Mrs Peter Rodd thereafter, was an English novelist and biographer, one of the Bright Young People on the London social scene in the inter-war years. She was born at 1 Graham Street (now Graham Place) in Belgravia, London, the eldest daughter of Lord Redesdale, and was brought up at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire. She was the eldest of the six controversial Mitford sisters.
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She is best remembered for her series of novels about upper-class life in England and France, particularly the four published after 1945; but she also wrote four well-received, well-researched popular biographies (of Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, and Frederick the Great). She was one of -
William Kamkwamba
William Kamkwamba was born August 5, 1987 in Malawi, and grew up on his family farm in Wimbe, two and half hours northeast of Malawi’s capital city. William was educated at Wimbe Primary School, completing 8th grade and was then accepted to secondary school. Due to severe famine in 2001-2002, his family lacked funds to pay $80 in school fees and William was forced to drop out in his freshman year. For five years he was unable to go to school. Rather than accept his fate, William borrowed books from a small community lending library, including an American textbook Using Energy, which depicted a wind turbine. He decided to build a windmill to power his family’s home. First he built a prototype, then his initial 5-meter windmill out of a broke
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R.C. Sherriff
Robert Cedric Sherriff was an English writer best known for his play Journey's End which was based on his experiences as a Captain in World War I. He wrote several plays, novels, and screenplays, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) and two British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
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D.E. Stevenson
There is more than one author with this name
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Dorothy Emily Stevenson was a best-selling Scottish author. She published more than 40 romantic novels over a period of more than 40 years. Her father was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson.
D.E. Stevenson had an enormously successful writing career: between 1923 and 1970, four million copies of her books were sold in Britain and three million in the States. Like E.F. Benson, Ann Bridge, O. Douglas or Dorothy L. Sayers (to name but a few) her books are funny, intensely readable, engaging and dependable. -
Celia Fremlin
Celia was born in Kingsbury, now part of London, England. She was the daughter of Heaver Fremlin and Margaret Addiscott. Her older brother, John H. Fremlin, later became a nuclear physicist. Celia studied at Somerville College, Oxford University. From 1942 to 2000 she lived in Hampstead, London. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, with whom she had three children; he died in 1968. In 1985, Celia married Leslie Minchin, who died in 1999. Her many crime novels and stories helped modernize the sensation novel tradition by introducing criminal and (rarely) supernatural elements into domestic settings. Her 1958 novel The Hours Before Dawn won the Edgar Award in 1960.
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With Jeffrey Barnard, she was co-presenter of a BBC2 documentary “Night and Day” de -
Barbara Pym
People know British writer Barbara Pym for her comic novels, such as Excellent Women (1952), of English life.
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After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Barbara Pym served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. From 1950 to 1961, she published six novels, but her 7th was declined by the publisher due to a change in the reading public's tastes.
The turning point for Pym came with a famous article in the 1975 Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. A -
Patricia Wentworth
Patricia Wentworth--born Dora Amy Elles--was a British crime fiction writer.
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She was educated privately and at Blackheath High School in London. After the death of her first husband, George F. Dillon, in 1906, she settled in Camberley, Surrey. She married George Oliver Turnbull in 1920 and they had one daughter.
She wrote a series of 32 classic-style whodunnits featuring Miss Silver, the first of which was published in 1928, and the last in 1961, the year of her death.
Miss Silver, a retired governess-turned private detective, is sometimes compared to Jane Marple, the elderly detective created by Agatha Christie. She works closely with Scotland Yard, especially Inspector Frank Abbott and is fond of quoting the poet Tennyson.
Wentworth also wr -
Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine was her mother's first name and Tey the surname of an English Grandmother. As Josephine Tey, she wrote six mystery novels featuring Scotland Yard's Inspector Alan Grant.
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The first of these, The Man in the Queue (1929) was published under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot , whose name also appears on the title page of another of her 1929 novels, Kif; An Unvarnished History. She also used the Daviot by-line for a biography of the 17th century cavalry leader John Graham, which was entitled Claverhouse (1937).
Mackintosh also wrote plays (both one act and full length), some of which were produced during her lifetime, under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot. The district of Daviot, near h -
Dorothy L. Sayers
The detective stories of well-known British writer Dorothy Leigh Sayers mostly feature the amateur investigator Lord Peter Wimsey; she also translated the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.
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This renowned author and Christian humanist studied classical and modern languages.
Her best known mysteries, a series of short novels, set between World War I and World War II, feature an English aristocrat and amateur sleuth. She is also known for her plays and essays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy... -
E.M. Delafield
Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture (9 June 1890 – 2 December 1943), commonly known as E. M. Delafield, was a prolific English author who is best-known for her largely autobiographical Diary of a Provincial Lady, which took the form of a journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman living mostly in a Devon village of the 1930s, and its sequels in which the Provincial Lady buys a flat in London and travels to America. Other sequels of note are her experiences looking for war-work during the Phoney War in 1939, and her experiences as a tourist in the Soviet Union.
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Daughter of the novelist Mrs. Henry De La Pasture. -
D.E. Stevenson
There is more than one author with this name
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Dorothy Emily Stevenson was a best-selling Scottish author. She published more than 40 romantic novels over a period of more than 40 years. Her father was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson.
D.E. Stevenson had an enormously successful writing career: between 1923 and 1970, four million copies of her books were sold in Britain and three million in the States. Like E.F. Benson, Ann Bridge, O. Douglas or Dorothy L. Sayers (to name but a few) her books are funny, intensely readable, engaging and dependable. -
Elizabeth Jenkins
From Elizabeth Jenkins' obituary in The New York Times:
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As a novelist, Ms. Jenkins was best known for “The Tortoise and the Hare” (1954), the story of a disintegrating marriage between a barrister and his desperate wife that Hilary Mantel, writing in The Sunday Times of London in 1993, called “as smooth and seductive as a bowl of cream.” Its author, Ms. Mantel wrote, “seems to know a good deal about how women think and how their lives are arranged; what women collude in, what they fear.”
To a wider public Ms. Jenkins was known as the author of psychologically acute, stylishly written, accessible biographies. Most dealt with important literary or historical figures, but in “Joseph Lister” (1960) she told the life of the English surgeon who pi -
Dorothy Evelyn Smith
Dorothy Evelyn Smith was born in Derby, England, the daughter of a Methodist parson. She first began to write successfully for English magazines while her husband was serving in the First World War. Thereafter her short stories and articles steadily reached a wide market, though her work was subject to interruptions from her growing daughter and son and their prodigious number of pets. In 1939, when most English magazines went off the market, Mrs. Smith began her first novel, interrupted this time by her war work. Often she wrote "on the end of the kitchen table with bombs falling around the house," and part of her first novel was finished while she was confined to bed with an injured leg.
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Now that peace had come, Mrs. Smith wrote in her own -
R.A. Dick
R.A. Dick was the pseudonym of Josephine Leslie (Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie), an Irish writer who wrote the 1945 novel The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. The book was made into a movie in 1947 starring Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, George Sanders and Natalie Wood. It was also a television series in the 1960's. She also wrote The Devil and Mrs Devine.
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Barbara Pym
People know British writer Barbara Pym for her comic novels, such as Excellent Women (1952), of English life.
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After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Barbara Pym served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. From 1950 to 1961, she published six novels, but her 7th was declined by the publisher due to a change in the reading public's tastes.
The turning point for Pym came with a famous article in the 1975 Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. A -
Sally Benson
Sally Benson was an American author of short stories and screenplays. She was born Sara Smith in St. Louis, Missouri, but moved to New York City late in her childhood. After graduating from Horace Mann School, she married Reynolds "Babe" Benson and began publishing short stories. She is best known for her semi-autobiographical collections Meet Me in St. Louis and Junior Miss, each first published as a series of 12 short stories in The New Yorker. She died in Woodland Hills, California, in 1972.
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Charlotte Mary Yonge
Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, known for her huge output, now mostly out of print.
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She began writing in 1848, and published during her long life about 160 works, chiefly novels. Her first commercial success, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), provided the funding to enable the schooner Southern Cross to be put into service on behalf of George Selwyn. Similar charitable works were done with the profits from later novels. Yonge was also a founder and editor for forty years of The Monthly Packet, a magazine (founded in 1851) with a varied readership, but targeted at British Anglican girls (in later years it was addressed to a somewhat wider readership).
Among the best known of her works are The Heir of Redclyffe, Heartsease, and The Da -
Mary Stewart
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Lady Mary Stewart, born Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow, was a popular English novelist, and taught at the school of John Norquay elementary for 30 to 35 years.
She was one of the most widely read fiction writers of our time. The author of twenty novels, a volume of poetry, and three books for young readers, she was admired for both her contemporary stories of romantic suspense and her historical novels. Born in England, she lived for many years in Scotland, spending time between Edinburgh and the West Highlands.
Her unofficial fan site can be found at http://marystewartnovels.blogspot.com/. -
Reginald Arkell
Reginald Arkell was a British script writer and comic novelist who wrote many musical plays for the London theatre. The most popular of those was an adaptation of the spoof history book 1066 and All That: 1066—and all that: A Musical Comedy based on that Memorable History by Sellar and Yeatman.
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He was the author of A Cottage in the Country and the Green Fingers series of garden verse.
Arkell was born on 14 October 1882 at Lechlade, Gloucestershire, England, was educated at Burford Grammar School and trained as a journalist. He married actress Elizabeth Evans in 1912.
During the First World War he served with the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and The Norfolk Regiment. Arkell died on 1 May 1959 at Cricklade, England. -
Elizabeth Fair
Elizabeth Mary Fair was born in 1908 in Haigh, Lancashire, a small village not far from Wigan.] Her father was the land agent for the 10th Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, whose family seat, Haigh Hall, was nearby. Elizabeth and her sister were educated by a governess. Her father died in 1934 and the family moved to Hampshire, where they had a small house and a large garden in New Forest.
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During World War II Fair served for five years as an ambulance driver in the Civil Defence Corps in Southampton. In 1944 she joined the Red Cross and spent eighteen months in Ceylon, India, and Belgium.[3]
After returning to England in 1947, she moved to Boldre in Hampshire.
Fair wrote six novels of English village life that humorously and gently dissected -
Francis Duncan
Francis Duncan is the pseudonym for William Walter Frank Underhill, who was born in 1914. He lived virtually all his life in Bristol and was a 'scholarship boy' boarder at Queen Elizabeth's Hospital school. Due to family circumstances he was unable to go to university and started work in the Housing Department of Bristol City Council. Writing was always important to him and very early on he published articles in newspapers and magazines. His first detective story was published in 1936. In 1938 he married Sylvia Henly. Although a conscientious objector, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War II, landing in France shortly after D-Day. After the war he trained as a teacher and spent the rest of his life in education, first as a
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Nancy Brysson Morrison
Agnes Morrison or Agnes Brysson Inglis Morrison; Nancy Morrison was a Scottish writer. She wrote biographies, novels and some romantic fiction. Known for writing about Scottish history and for focusing on those usually lost to history. She also wrote under the pseudonym Christine Strathern.
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Dorothy Lambert
Dorothy Lambert (born Alice Dorothea Irwin) was known for her many romance novels, often incorporating humor and occasionally farce. She left Ireland when she got married in 1906. She died in Kent, near Dover.
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Meredith Nicholson
Meredith Nicholson was a best-selling author, a politician, and a diplomat.
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Verily Anderson
Born in 1915, Verily Bruce Anderson was the daughter of a clergyman (the Rev. Rosslyn Bruce), and was educated at Edgbaston High School for Girls, Birmingham, and Normanhurst School, Sussex. She studied at the Royal College of Music, in London, and worked in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry from 1939 to 1941. In 1940, she married Captain Donald Anderson, and had five children - one son and four daughters. In addition to her children's books - most notably, the "Brownie" series - she wrote a number of volumes of autobiography, and worked for the BBC from 1946 through 2002. She died in 2010.
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Laura Talbot
Laura Talbot was the pen name of Lady Ursula Winifred Chetwynd-Talbot, who was known as ‘La’ to her friends.
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Born in 1907, to Viscount Charles Chetwynd-Talbot and his wife Winifred, La was married four times. In 1930, she became the wife of Hector Stewart, and in 1942, of Lieutenant Michael Burton Stewart.
In 1954, La married Patrick Hamilton, with whom she had been having an affair, and finally, Dr. William James in December 1964.
She and her last husband were tragically killed in an air accident in August 1966. -
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau (1802 - 1876) was an English writer and philosopher, renowned in her day as a controversial journalist, political economist, abolitionist and life-long feminist. Martineau has also been called the first female sociologist and the first female journalist in England.
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Comprehensive list of her works with links to digitized versions here. -
Frank Baker
Frank Baker was born in Hornsey, London in 1908. He was educated at Winchester Cathedral School, where he enjoyed singing in Cathedral choir. He seems to have inherited a love of music from his grandfather who played the organ at Alexandra Palace. As a young man Frank went into his father's business of marine insurance in the City of London, before leaving after five years to spend a year working at the School of Church Music. With £20 and a small piano he moved from London to Cornwall, and settled in a cottage at St. Just-in-Penwith, earning £1 a week as an organist. There he began to write. His first novel, 'The Twisted Tree' was published in 1935.
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Over his life Frank Baker published a series of novels and short stories as well as articles