Betty Miller
Betty Miller (1910-65), was born in Ireland to a Lithuanian businessman and a Swedish teacher whose (Polish) family was distantly related to the philosopher Henri Bergson. She went to school in London and did a diploma in journalism at University College before publishing the first of her seven novels. In 1933 she married the psychiatrist Emanuel Miller (1892-1970) and then wrote two more well-received novels and Farewell Leicester Square (unpublished until 1941). During the war she lived in the country with her children, Jonathan (b.1934) and Sarah (b.1937), writing On the Side of the Angels (1945, repr. 1985) and a biography of Robert Browning (1952). Her London circle included Olivia Manning, Stevie Smith, Marghanita Laski and Isaiah Ber
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Judith Rossner
Judith Perelman Rossner was an American novelist, best known for her 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which was inspired by the murder of Roseann Quinn and examined the underside of the seventies sexual liberation movement. Though Looking for Mr. Goodbar remained Rossner's best known and best selling work, she continued to write. Her most successful post-Goodbar novel was 1983's August, about the relationship between a troubled young woman and her psychoanalyst who has emotional troubles of her own.
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Elizabeth Berridge
Elizabeth Berridge grew up in the ‘safe London suburb’ of Wandsworth Common. A year in Switzerland and a ‘hateful’ period at the Bank of England, described in Be Clean, Be Tidy (1949), was followed by work in a photographic news agency. She married Reginald Moore in 1940, published her first short story in 1941 and, in 1943, after the birth of the first of her two children, moved to a remote house in Wales, where Moore edited Modern Reading and other wartime anthologies and she wrote the stories reprinted in Tell It to a Stranger – published as Selected Stories in 1947; they returned to London in 1950. Elizabeth Berridge published nine novels, Across the Common winning the Yorkshire Post Award for Best Novel of the Year in 1964. She reviewe
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Margaret Bonham
Margaret Bonham (1913-91) was born in London and went to Wimbledon High School for Girls. She married disastrously when very young, but re-married in 1940 and lived in Wales with her conscientious objector husband Deryck Bazalgette, who was working on the land. A daughter, Cary, was born in 1942, and a son in 1944. After the war she abandoned her family to marry Charles Kimber, the socialist inheritor of a baronetcy and affluence, with whom she shared a love of rally driving and good living; their home was a large C17th house in Oxfordshire, where two more children were born. Meanwhile she had published short stories in magazines: The Casino (1948) was her own selection; a novel came out in 1951. Her third and final marriage having collapse
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George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
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Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as t -
Pat Barker
Pat Barker is an English writer known for her fiction exploring themes of memory, trauma, and survival. She gained prominence with Union Street (1982), a stark portrayal of working-class women's lives, and later achieved critical acclaim with the Regeneration Trilogy (1991–1995), a series blending history and fiction to examine the psychological impact of World War I. The final book, The Ghost Road (1995), won the Booker Prize. In recent years, she has turned to retelling classical myths from a female perspective, beginning with The Silence of the Girls (2018). Barker's work is widely recognized for its direct and unflinching storytelling.
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Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and she has been a critically acclaimed international bestselling author ever since.
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She is the author of a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, and of the critically acclaimed novels Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird, Case Histories, and One Good Turn.
Case Histories introduced her readers to Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, and won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.
When Will There Be Good News? was voted Richard & Judy Book Best Read of the Year. After Case Histories and One Good Turn, it was her third novel to fea -
Olivia Manning
Olivia Manning CBE was a British novelist, poet, writer and reviewer. Her fiction and non-fiction, frequently detailing journeys and personal odysseys, were principally set in England, Ireland, Europe and the Middle East. She often wrote from her personal experience, though her books also demonstrate strengths in imaginative writing. Her books are widely admired for her artistic eye and vivid descriptions of place.
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In August 1939 she married R.D. Smith ("Reggie"), a British Council lecturer posted in Bucharest, Romania, and subsequently in Greece, Egypt and Palestine as the Nazis over-ran Eastern Europe. Her experiences formed the basis for her best known work, the six novels making up "The Balkan Trilogy" and "The Levant Trilogy," known col -
Elizabeth Berridge
Elizabeth Berridge grew up in the ‘safe London suburb’ of Wandsworth Common. A year in Switzerland and a ‘hateful’ period at the Bank of England, described in Be Clean, Be Tidy (1949), was followed by work in a photographic news agency. She married Reginald Moore in 1940, published her first short story in 1941 and, in 1943, after the birth of the first of her two children, moved to a remote house in Wales, where Moore edited Modern Reading and other wartime anthologies and she wrote the stories reprinted in Tell It to a Stranger – published as Selected Stories in 1947; they returned to London in 1950. Elizabeth Berridge published nine novels, Across the Common winning the Yorkshire Post Award for Best Novel of the Year in 1964. She reviewe
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Anne Enright
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three volumes of stories, one book of nonfiction, and five novels. In 2015, she was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize, and The Forgotten Waltz won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
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Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor (née Coles) was a popular English novelist and short story writer. Elizabeth Coles was born in Reading, Berkshire in 1912. She was educated at The Abbey School, Reading, and worked as a governess, as a tutor and as a librarian.
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In 1936, she married John William Kendall Taylor, a businessman. She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life.
Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was published in 1945 and was followed by eleven more. Her short stories were published in various magazines and collected in four volumes. She also wrote a children's book.
Taylor's work is mainly concerned with the nuances of "everyday" life and situations, which she writes about with dexterity. Her shrewd but affectionate portraya -
Etty Hillesum
Esther 'Etty' Hillesum was a young Jewish woman whose letters and diaries, kept between 1941 and 1943 describe life in Amsterdam during the German occupation. They were published posthumously in 1981, before being translated into English in 1983.
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Etty spent her childhood years in Middelburg, Hilversum (1914–16), Tiel (1916–18), Winschoten (1918–24) and Deventer, from July 1924 on, where she entered the fifth form of the Graaf van Burenschool. The family lived at number 51 on the A. J. Duymaer van Twiststraat (at present time number 2). Later (in 1933) they moved to the Geert Grootestraat 9, but by then Etty was no longer living at home. After primary school, Etty attended the gymnasium (grammar school) in Deventer, where her father was deput -
Aminatta Forna
Aminatta’s books have been translated into eighteen languages. Her essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Observer and Vogue. She has written stories for BBC radio and written and presented television documentaries including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013).
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Aminatta is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker Prize.
In 2003 Aminatta established the Rogbonko Project to build a school in a village in Sierra -
Marghanita Laski
English journalist, radio panelist, and novelist: she also wrote literary biography, plays, and short stories.
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Laski was born to a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals: Neville Laski was her father, Moses Gaster her grandfather, and socialist thinker Harold Laski her uncle. She was educated at Lady Barn House School and St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith. After a stint in fashion, she read English at Oxford, then married publisher John Howard, and worked in journalism. She began writing once her son and daughter were born.
A well-known critic as well as a novelist, she wrote books on Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ecstasy (1962) explored intense experiences, and Everyday Ecstasy (1974) their social effects. Her distinctive voice was o -
Judith Rossner
Judith Perelman Rossner was an American novelist, best known for her 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which was inspired by the murder of Roseann Quinn and examined the underside of the seventies sexual liberation movement. Though Looking for Mr. Goodbar remained Rossner's best known and best selling work, she continued to write. Her most successful post-Goodbar novel was 1983's August, about the relationship between a troubled young woman and her psychoanalyst who has emotional troubles of her own.
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Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie also wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and was occasionally published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan.
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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen -
Tash Aw
Born in Taiwan to Malaysian parents, Tash Aw grew up in Kuala Lumpur before moving to England in his teens. He studied law at the University of Cambridge and University of Warwick, then moved to London to write. After graduating he worked at a number of jobs, including as a lawyer for four years whilst writing his debut novel, which he completed during the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. Based on royalties as well as prizes, Aw is the most successful Malaysian writer of recent years. Following the announcement of the Booker longlist, the Whitbread Award and his Commonwealth Writers' Prize, he became a celebrity in Malaysia and Singapore, and is now one of the most respected literary figures in Southeast Asia.
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Mollie Panter-Downes
Mary Patricia "Mollie" Panter-Downes was a novelist and newspaper columnist for The New Yorker. Aged sixteen, she wrote The Shoreless Sea which became a bestseller; eight editions were published in 1923 and 1924, and the book was serialised in The Daily Mirror. Her second novel The Chase was published in 1925.
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After her marriage to Aubrey Robinson in 1927, the couple moved to Surrey, and in 1938 Panter-Downes began writing for the New Yorker, first a series of short stories, and from September 1939, a column entitled Letter from London, which she wrote until 1984. The collected columns were later published as Letters from England (1940) and London War Notes (1972).
After visiting Ootacamund, in India, she wrote about the town, known to all as -
Helen Zenna Smith
Pseudonym used by the Australian-British author Evadne Price.
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Eva Grace Price was born on 28 August 1888 in Merewether, New South Wales, Australia, of British descent. Her father, Jonathan Dixon Price, was an Autralian miner. Fiction abounds in the autobiographical details supplied by own Evadne Price. She claimed that she lied about her age, when her father died, and she went on stage to support herself and to travel alone to England. She said that she was born on 1896 at sea, on an ocean liner during a travel to Australia, or later that she was born on 1901 in Sussex, England.
On 28 August 1909 in Sydney, she married Henry A. Dabelstein, a German-born actor. After moved to England to acting, she decided reinventing herself, changing her nam -
Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan was raised on a farm in Wicklow. She completed her undergraduate studies at Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana and subsequently earned an MA at The University of Wales and an M.Phil at Trinity College, Dublin.
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Her first collection of stories, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. Her second, Walk the Blue Fields, was Richard Ford’s book of the year. Her works have won several awards including The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship, The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, The Martin Healy Prize, The Olive Cook Award, The Kilkenny Prize, The Tom Gallon Award and The William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor. Twice was Keegan the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was also a Wingate -
Dorothy Whipple
Born in 1893, DOROTHY WHIPPLE (nee Stirrup) had an intensely happy childhood in Blackburn as part of the large family of a local architect. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first week of the war, for three years she worked as secretary to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a widower twenty-four years her senior and whom she married in 1917. Their life was mostly spent in Nottingham; here she wrote Young Anne (1927), the first of nine extremely successful novels which included Greenbanks (1932) and The Priory (1939). Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr Knight (1934) and They were Sisters (1943), were made into films. She also wrote short storie
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Winifred Watson
Winifred Eileen Watson (20 October 1906 - 5 August 2002) was an English writer. She is best known for her novel, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which was adapted into a major motion picture of the same name (released in 2008).
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Bibliography:
Fell Top (1935)
Odd Shoes (1936)
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938)
Upyonder (1938)
Hop, Step, Jump (1939)
Leave and Bequeath (1943) -
Amy Levy
Levy was born in Clapham, London, the second daughter of Lewis Levy and Isobel Levin. Her Jewish family was mildly observant, but as an adult Levy no longer practised Judaism; she continued to identify with the Jews as a people.
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She was educated at Brighton High School, Brighton, and studied at Newnham College, Cambridge; she was the first Jewish student at Newnham, when she arrived in 1879, but left after four terms.
Her circle of friends included Clementina Black, Dollie Radford, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx), and Olive Schreiner. Levy wrote stories, essays, and poems for periodicals, some popular and others literary. Her writing career began early; her poem "Ida Grey" appearing in the journal the Pelican when she was only fourteen. -
Winifred Peck
Lady Winifred Peck (née Knox), born 1882, was a member of a remarkable family. Her father was Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, the fourth Bishop of Manchester, and her siblings were E. V. Knox, editor of Punch magazine, Ronald Knox, theologian and writer, Dilly Knox, cryptographer, Wilfred Lawrence Knox, clergyman, and Ethel Knox. Peck’s niece was the Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote a biography of her father, E. V. Knox, and her uncles, entitled The Knox Brothers.
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She read Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her first book was a biography of Louis IX in 1909.
In 1911 she married James Peck, a British civil servant, who was awarded a knighthood in 1938. They had three children.
In 1919 she began her novel-writing care -
Helen Ashton
Helen Ashton was the daughter of the Arthur J. Ashton, K.C. Encouraged by her father, the author of a delightful book of legal reminiscences, she wrote three juvenile novels, then her literary work was interrupted by WWI and she took up nursing. In 1916 she began studying medicine, working at Great Ormond Street Hospital until her marriage to Arthur Jordan, a barrister twenty years older than herself, in 1927.
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Over the next thirty years Ashton published 25 novels: Doctor Serocold (1930), her most successful, was about a day in the life of an English country doctor; Bricks and Mortar (1932) is about the life of an architect over forty years; and from 1941-7 she published an excellent quartet of novels about contemporary village life. -
Josephine Winslow Johnson
American novelist, poet, and essayist who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1935 at age 24 for her first novel, Now in November. Shortly thereafter, she published Winter Orchard, a collection of short stories that had previously appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The St. Louis Review, and Hound & Horn. Of these stories, "Dark" won an O. Henry Award in 1934[1], and "John the Six" won an O. Henry Award third prize the following year. Johnson continued writing short stories and won three more O. Henry Awards: for "Alexander to the Park" (1942), "The Glass Pigeon" (1943), and "Night Flight" (1944).
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Johnson was bornin Kirkwood, Missouri. She attended Washington University from 1926 to 1931, but did not earn a degree. She wrote her fir -
Margaret Bonham
Margaret Bonham (1913-91) was born in London and went to Wimbledon High School for Girls. She married disastrously when very young, but re-married in 1940 and lived in Wales with her conscientious objector husband Deryck Bazalgette, who was working on the land. A daughter, Cary, was born in 1942, and a son in 1944. After the war she abandoned her family to marry Charles Kimber, the socialist inheritor of a baronetcy and affluence, with whom she shared a love of rally driving and good living; their home was a large C17th house in Oxfordshire, where two more children were born. Meanwhile she had published short stories in magazines: The Casino (1948) was her own selection; a novel came out in 1951. Her third and final marriage having collapse
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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. -
Benjamin Wood
Benjamin Wood was born in 1981 and grew up in Merseyside. He is the author of five novels, the latest of which, SEASCRAPER, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. His first book won France's Prix du Roman Fnac and Prix Baudelaire in 2014. His other works have been shortlisted for a number of awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Costa First Novel Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award, the European Union Prize for Literature, the Commonwealth Book Award, and the RSL Encore Award. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King's College London, where he teaches fiction modules and founded the PhD in Creative Writing programme. He lives in Surrey with his wife and sons.
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M.J. Farrell
M.J. Farrell is a pseudonym used by Molly Keane for her earlier published novels and plays.
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Emma Smith
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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EMMA SMITH was born in Cornwall in 1923 and was privately educated. In 1939 she took her first job in the Records Department of the War Office before volunteering for work on the canals; this gave her the material for Maidens' Trip (1948), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. She spent the winter of 1946-7 with a documentary film unit in India and then lived in Paris and wrote The Far Cry (1949), awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best novel of the year in English. In 1951 Emma Smith married and had two children. After her husband's death in 1957 she went to live in rural Wales; she then -
Helen Ashton
Helen Ashton was the daughter of the Arthur J. Ashton, K.C. Encouraged by her father, the author of a delightful book of legal reminiscences, she wrote three juvenile novels, then her literary work was interrupted by WWI and she took up nursing. In 1916 she began studying medicine, working at Great Ormond Street Hospital until her marriage to Arthur Jordan, a barrister twenty years older than herself, in 1927.
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Over the next thirty years Ashton published 25 novels: Doctor Serocold (1930), her most successful, was about a day in the life of an English country doctor; Bricks and Mortar (1932) is about the life of an architect over forty years; and from 1941-7 she published an excellent quartet of novels about contemporary village life. -
Helen Zenna Smith
Pseudonym used by the Australian-British author Evadne Price.
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Eva Grace Price was born on 28 August 1888 in Merewether, New South Wales, Australia, of British descent. Her father, Jonathan Dixon Price, was an Autralian miner. Fiction abounds in the autobiographical details supplied by own Evadne Price. She claimed that she lied about her age, when her father died, and she went on stage to support herself and to travel alone to England. She said that she was born on 1896 at sea, on an ocean liner during a travel to Australia, or later that she was born on 1901 in Sussex, England.
On 28 August 1909 in Sydney, she married Henry A. Dabelstein, a German-born actor. After moved to England to acting, she decided reinventing herself, changing her nam