Gwendoline Courtney
Born near Southampton in 1911, Gwendoline Courtney was the daughter of antiques dealer Edwin Courtney, and his wife Joanna. She was distantly related to author and educator Arthur Mee, and first cousins with Phyllis Norris, who wrote a number of books for girls. The family moved to Wallasey when Courtney was young, and she was educated at Oldershaw High School. She worked for a time in her father’s office, before joining Lord Goodman’s staff, during WWII, and prided herself on being the only civilian to work on Operation Overlord. After the deaths of their parents, Courtney and her two sisters lived together for the rest of their lives, moving from place to place - Courtney had sustained an ear injury, during a bomb blast, that made quiet a
If you like author Gwendoline Courtney here is the list of authors you may also like
Buy books on AmazonTotal similar authors (19)
-
Tessa Dunlop
Tessa Dunlop is a television presenter, radio broadcaster and historian. She has presented history programmes on BBC1 London, BBC2, Discovery Europe, Channel 4, UKTV History and the History Channel (USA).
Buy books on Amazon
In 2005 Dunlop won a Royal Television Society award for her work on regional magazine show Inside Out West.
In 2007 Dunlop filmed Paranormal Egypt, a six-part series, with Derek Acorah on location in Egypt.
Dunlop read history at Oxford University, where she also won the Gertrude Easton Prize. Her articles have appeared in a number of British newspaper publications including The Guardian, The Independent, The Mail on Sunday and The Herald. -
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.
Buy books on Amazon
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... -
Kate Saunders
Kate Saunders (born 1960) was an English author, actress, and journalist. The daughter of the early public relations advocate Basil Saunders and his journalist wife Betty (née Smith), Saunders has worked for newspapers and magazines in the UK, including The Sunday Times, Sunday Express, Daily Telegraph, She, and Cosmopolitan.
Buy books on Amazon
She has also been a regular contributor to radio and television, with appearances on the Radio 4 programs Woman's Hour, Start the Week, and Kaleidoscope. She was, with Sandi Toksvig, a guest on the first episode of the long-running news quiz program Have I Got News For You.
Saunders has also written multiple books for children and for adults. -
Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer was a prolific historical romance and detective fiction novelist. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story for her younger brother into the novel The Black Moth.
Buy books on Amazon
In 1925 she married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer. Rougier later became a barrister and he often provided basic plot outlines for her thrillers. Beginning in 1932, Heyer released one romance novel and one thriller each year.
Heyer was an intensely private person who remained a best selling author all her life without the aid of publicity. She made no appearances, never gave an interview and only answered fan letters herself if they made an interesting historical point. She wrote one novel using the pseudonym Stella Martin.
Her Georgian and -
Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
Elinor M. Brent-Dyer was born as Gladys Eleanor May Dyer on 6th April 1894, in South Shields in the industrial northeast of England, and grew up in a terraced house which had no garden or inside toilet. She was the only daughter of Eleanor Watson Rutherford and Charles Morris Brent Dyer. Her father, who had been married before, left home when she was three years old. In 1912, her brother Henzell died at age 17 of cerebro-spinal fever. After her father died, her mother remarried in 1913.
Buy books on Amazon
Elinor was educated at a small local private school in South Shields and returned there to teach when she was eighteen after spending two years at the City of Leeds Training College. Her teaching career spanned 36 years, during which she taught in a wide vari -
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie also wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and was occasionally published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan.
Buy books on Amazon
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 -
Henry Handel Richardson
Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson Robertson for mixed motives used and adopted Henry Handel Richardson, a pen-name that probably militated against recognition especially when feminist literary history began. Maurice Guest was highly praised in Germany when it first appeared in translation in 1912, but received a bad press in England, though it influenced other novelists. The publishers bowdlerized the language for the second imprint. The trilogy suffered from the long intervals between its three volumes: Australia Felix (1917); The Way Home (1925) and Ultima Thule (1929). The last brought overnight fame and the three volumes were published as one in 1930. Her fame in England was short-lived; as late as 1977, when Virago Press republished T
Buy books on Amazon -
Jane Shaw
Jane Shaw (1910-2000), born Jean Bell Shaw Patrick, was a children's book author. She was the daughter of Dr. John Patrick, and his wife, Margaret (née Shaw). Educated first by a governess, and then at the Park School in Glasgow, she went on to Glasgow University, where she graduated with Honors in English Literature and Language, in 1932. After taking a teacher training course in London, Shaw returned to Glasgow, where she worked for the publisher Collins, and where one of the editors encouraged her to write her own stories. Breton Holiday, published in 1939, was the result.
Buy books on Amazon
Shaw married accountant John Evans in 1939, settling with him in Dulwich, London, where they lived with their children - daughter Jane, son Ian - until they were bombed -
Clare Chambers
Clare Chambers was born on 1966 in in Croydon, Surrey, England, UK, daughter of English teachers. She attended a school in Croydon. At 16, she met Peter, her future husband, a teacher 14 years old than her. She read English at Oxford. The marriage moved to New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel. She now lives in Kent with her husband and young family. In 1999, her novel Learning to Swim won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.
Buy books on Amazon -
Lissa Evans
After a brief career in medicine, and an even briefer one in stand-up, Lissa Evans became a comedy producer, first in radio and then in television. Her first novel, Spencer's List, was published in 2002, and since then she has written three more books for adults (two of them longlisted for the Orange/Baileys Prize) and two for children (the first of them shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal). Her two most recent books for adults were set in London during the Second World War; one of them, 'Their Finest Hour and a Half' has now been made into a film entitled 'Their Finest', starring Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin and Bill Nighy
Buy books on Amazon -
Margaret Biggs
Born in 1929 in Orpington, Kent, Margaret Biggs was the daughter of a local Sales Manager for Chivers. Her family moved to Barnet, in Hertfordshire, in 1935, where she attended Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School until 1946. When she left school, she went to work for the editorial department of the Evans Brothers publishing company, in Bloomsbury. She married David Cadney in 1953, and moved with him to Finchley, and then (in the 1960s) to Solihull, in the West Midlands, where she still lives today. She has one daughter and two sons.
Buy books on Amazon
The author of a number of popular and collectible girls' school stories, Margaret Biggs is probably best known for her Melling School series, which is set at a weekly boarding school and is unusual, in that it shows -
Elsie J. Oxenham
A celebrated English girls’ school story writer, Elsie J. Oxenham's was born Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley in 1880 in Southport, Lancashire, She was the daughter of writer John_Oxenham, born William John Dunkerley, who had chosen the pseudonym ‘John Oxenham’. And Elsie decided to adopt the same surname for her writing career.
Buy books on Amazon
Her father was a clear influence upon her own writing. Her brother, Roderic Dunkerley, was also an author (published under his own name), as was her sister Erica, who also used the 'Oxenham' name.
She grew up in Ealing, West London, where her family had moved when she was a baby, living there until 1922, when the family moved again, to Worthing. After the deaths of her parents, Oxenham lived with her sister Maida. She died i -
Alis Hawkins
Alis Hawkins grew up on a dairy farm in Cardiganshire. Her inner introvert thought it would be a good idea to become a shepherd and, frankly, if she had, she might have been published sooner. As it was, three years reading English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford revealed an extrovert streak and a social conscience which saw her train as a Speech and Language Therapist. She has spent the subsequent three decades variously bringing up two sons, working with children and young people on the autism spectrum and writing fiction, non-fiction and plays. She writes the kind of books she likes to read: character-driven historical crime and mystery fiction with what might be called literary production values.
Buy books on Amazon
Series: The Teifi Valley Coroner histor -
Mabel Esther Allan
A prolific British children's author, who also wrote under the pen-names Jean Estoril, Priscilla Hagon, Anne Pilgrim, and Kathleen M. Pearcey, Mabel Esther Allan is particularly known for her school and ballet stories.
Buy books on Amazon
Born in 1915 at Wallasey on the Wirral Peninsula, Allan knew from an early age that she wanted to be an author, and published her first short stories in the 1930s. Her writing career was interrupted by World War II, during which time she served in the Women's Land Army and taught school in Liverpool, but the 1948 publication of The Glen Castle Mystery saw it begin to take off in earnest. Influenced by Scottish educator A.S. Neill, Allan held progressive views about education, views that often found their way into her books, pa -
A.J. Pearce
AJ Pearce grew up in Hampshire in the south of England. She studied at the University of Sussex and Northwestern University. A chance discovery of a 1939 women's magazine became the inspiration for her historical series set in WW2, The Chronicles of Emmy Lake.
Buy books on Amazon
Funny, heartbreaking and always feel-good, if you're looking for uplifting novels about friendship and community, you've come to the right place.
You can find AJ on Instagram, FB and Threads @ajpearcewrites.
She also has a monthly newsletter. Please subscribe at https://ajpearce.com/ -
K.J. Charles
KJ is a writer of romance, mostly m/m, historical or fantasy or both. She blogs about writing and editing at http://kjcharleswriter.com.
Buy books on Amazon
She lives in London, UK, with her husband, two kids, and a cat of absolute night.
Bluesky @kj_charleswriter.com
Join the lively Discord group at https://discord.gg/fmPTWSZfT6
Sign up to the (infrequent) newsletter at http://kjcharleswriter.com/newsletter
Please **do not** message me on Goodreads as I no longer check the inbox due to unwanted messages. -
Suzanne Heywood
I grew up sailing around the world on a boat. My father set sail from England in 1976 on the Schooner Wavewalker with my brother, mother and me on board for what was supposed to be a three-year voyage but turned out to be a decade-long trip. While this meant that I saw a huge amount of our planet (though generally only the parts that are near sea level), it also meant that I was isolated as a child and struggled to get any formal education. Somehow, I managed to teach myself by correspondence and won a place to study at university. My book "Wavewalker" tells this story. It is both an adventure story and a coming-of-age story in a world that appeared idyllic but in reality was hugely challenging.
Buy books on Amazon
After gaining my degree and PhD I worked for a -
Margaret Biggs
Born in 1929 in Orpington, Kent, Margaret Biggs was the daughter of a local Sales Manager for Chivers. Her family moved to Barnet, in Hertfordshire, in 1935, where she attended Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School until 1946. When she left school, she went to work for the editorial department of the Evans Brothers publishing company, in Bloomsbury. She married David Cadney in 1953, and moved with him to Finchley, and then (in the 1960s) to Solihull, in the West Midlands, where she still lives today. She has one daughter and two sons.
Buy books on Amazon
The author of a number of popular and collectible girls' school stories, Margaret Biggs is probably best known for her Melling School series, which is set at a weekly boarding school and is unusual, in that it shows -
E.M.R. Burgess
Born in 1895 on the Isle of Wight, Esther Margaret Rooke Archibald was a teacher, and an author of children's novels, who was an active participant in the Guide movement for most of her life. She taught at Clifton High School for Girls, where she founded a Guide company that she led from 1918 to 1921, before moving on to Tunbridge Wells and Hamilton Kings, where she led a similar company from 1921 to 1926. She married civil servant Gordon Llewelyn Burgess, and moved with him to North London in 1926. She lived in Kensington in the 1930s, and became District Commissioner for Upper Holloway from 1930 and Tufnell Park from 1930 to 1935. Burgess continued to act as captain and District Commissioner for a variety of troupes and districts, through
Buy books on Amazon