Jan Struther
Pen name of Joyce Anstruther
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Julia Strachey
Julia Strachey (August, 1901–1979) was an English writer, born in Allahabad, India, where her father, Oliver Strachey, the elder brother of Lytton Strachey, was a civil servant. Her mother, Ruby, was of Swiss-German origin. For most of Julia's life she lived in England, where she worked as a model at Poiret, as a photographer and as a publisher's reader, before she embarked upon a career in novel-writing. She is perhaps best remembered for her work Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, a book originally published by the Hogarth Press and recently reprinted by Persephone Books.
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Published works:
- Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (1932), reprinted by Persephone Books in 2009
- 'Fragments of a Diary' (1940)
- 'Pioneer City' (1943)
- The Man on the Pie -
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1889-1955) was born and brought up in New York and educated at Miss Whitcombe's and other schools for young ladies. In 1913 she married George Holding, a British diplomat. They had two daughters and lived in various South American countries, and then in Bermuda, where her husband was a government official. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote six romantic novels in the 1920s but, after the stock market crash, turned to the more profitable genre of detective novels: from 1929-54 she wrote eighteen, as well as numerous short stories for magazines. In 1949 Raymond Chandler chose her as 'the best character and suspense writer (for consistent but not large production)', picking The Blank Wall (1947) as one of his favourites a
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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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Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth von Arnim, born Mary Annette Beauchamp, was an English novelist. Born in Australia, she married a German aristocrat, and her earliest works are set in Germany. Her first marriage made her Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin and her second Elizabeth Russell, Countess Russell. After her first husband's death, she had a three-year affair with the writer H.G. Wells, then later married Earl Russell, elder brother of the Nobel prize-winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield. Though known in early life as May, her first book introduced her to readers as Elizabeth, which she eventually became to friends and finally to family. Her writings are ascribed to Elizabeth von Arni
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Muriel Spark
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN f -
Grace Metalious
Grace Metalious was an American author, best known for the controversial novel Peyton Place.
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She was born into poverty and a broken home as Marie Grace de Repentigny in the mill town of Manchester, New Hampshire. Blessed with the gift of imagination, she was driven to write from an early age. After graduating from Manchester High School Central, she married George Metalious in 1943, became a housewife and mother, lived in near squalor — and continued to write.
With one child, the couple moved to Durham, New Hampshire, where George attended the University of New Hampshire. In Durham, Grace Metalious began writing seriously, neglecting her house and her three children. When George graduated, he took a position as principal at a school in Gilman -
Christianna Brand
Christianna Brand (December 17, 1907 - March 11, 1988) was a crime writer and children's author. Brand also wrote under the pseudonyms Mary Ann Ashe, Annabel Jones, Mary Roland, and China Thomson.
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She was born Mary Christianna Milne in 1907 in Malaya and spent her early years in India. She had a number of different occupations, including model, dancer, shop assistant and governess.
Her first novel, Death in High Heels, was written while Brand was working as a salesgirl. In 1941, one of her best-loved characters, Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police, made his debut in the book Heads You Lose. The character would go on to appear in seven of her novels. Green for Danger is Brand’s most famous novel. The whodunit, set in a World War 2 hos -
Richard Llewellyn
Richard Llewellyn (real name Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd) was a British novelist.
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Llewellyn was born of Welsh parents in Hendon, north London in 1906. Only after his death was it discovered that his claim that he was born in St. Davids, West Wales was false, though of course he was of Welsh blood.
Several of his novels dealt with a Welsh theme, the best-known being How Green Was My Valley (1939), which won international acclaim and was made into a classic Hollywood film. It immortalised the way of life of the South Wales Valleys coal mining communities, where Llewellyn spent a small amount of time with his grandfather. Three sequels followed.
He lived a peripatetic life, travelling widely throughout his life. Before World War II, he -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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. -
Monica Dickens
From the publisher: MONICA DICKENS, born in 1915, was brought up in London and was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her mother's German origins and her Catholicism gave her the detached eye of an outsider; at St Paul's Girls' School she was under occupied and rebellious. After drama school she was a debutante before working as a cook. One Pair of Hands (1939), her first book, described life in the kitchens of Kensington. It was the first of a group of semi autobiographies of which Mariana (1940), technically a novel, was one. 'My aim is to entertain rather than instruct,' she wrote. 'I want readers to recognise life in my books.' In 1951 Monica Dickens married a US naval officer, Roy Stratton, moved to America and adopted two dau
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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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Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1889-1955) was born and brought up in New York and educated at Miss Whitcombe's and other schools for young ladies. In 1913 she married George Holding, a British diplomat. They had two daughters and lived in various South American countries, and then in Bermuda, where her husband was a government official. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote six romantic novels in the 1920s but, after the stock market crash, turned to the more profitable genre of detective novels: from 1929-54 she wrote eighteen, as well as numerous short stories for magazines. In 1949 Raymond Chandler chose her as 'the best character and suspense writer (for consistent but not large production)', picking The Blank Wall (1947) as one of his favourites a
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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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Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Ysenda Maxtone Graham was born in 1962 and educated at The King's School, Canterbury and Girton College, Cambridge. She has written widely for many newspapers and magazines, as features writer, book reviewer and columnist. She is the author of The Church Hesitant: A Portrait of the Church of England; The Real Mrs Miniver, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography of the Year Award; and Mr Tibbits's Catholic School. She lives in London with her husband and their three sons.
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Julia Strachey
Julia Strachey (August, 1901–1979) was an English writer, born in Allahabad, India, where her father, Oliver Strachey, the elder brother of Lytton Strachey, was a civil servant. Her mother, Ruby, was of Swiss-German origin. For most of Julia's life she lived in England, where she worked as a model at Poiret, as a photographer and as a publisher's reader, before she embarked upon a career in novel-writing. She is perhaps best remembered for her work Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, a book originally published by the Hogarth Press and recently reprinted by Persephone Books.
Buy books on Amazon
Published works:
- Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (1932), reprinted by Persephone Books in 2009
- 'Fragments of a Diary' (1940)
- 'Pioneer City' (1943)
- The Man on the Pie -
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. -
Noel Streatfeild
Mary Noel Streatfeild, known as Noel Streatfeild, was an author best known and loved for her children's books, including Ballet Shoes and Circus Shoes. She also wrote romances under the pseudonym Susan Scarlett .
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She was born on Christmas Eve, 1895, the daughter of William Champion Streatfeild and Janet Venn and the second of six children to be born to the couple. Sister Ruth was the oldest, after Noel came Barbara, William ('Bill'), Joyce (who died of TB prior to her second birthday) and Richenda. Ruth and Noel attended Hastings and St. Leonard's Ladies' College in 1910. As an adult, she began theater work, and spent approximately 10 years in the theater.
During the Great War, in 1915 Noel worked first as a volunteer in a soldier's hospi -
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.
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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/ -
Peter Curtis
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Pseudonym of Norah Lofts
Peter^^Curtis -
Gene Tierney
Gene Tierney was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 19, 1920, to well-to-do parents. Her father was a very successful insurance broker and her mother was a former teacher.
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By 1938 she was performing on Broadway in "What a Life!" and understudied for "The Primerose Path" (1938) at the same time. Her wealthy father set up a corporation that was only to promote her theatrical pursuits.
After being spotted by the legendary Darryl F. Zanuck during a stage performance of the hit show "The Male Animal" (1940), Gene was signed to a contract with 20th Century-Fox. Her first role as Barbara Hall in "Hudson's Bay" (1941) would be the send-off vehicle for her career. Later that year she appeared in" The Return of Frank James" (1940). The next ye -
Richard Llewellyn
Richard Llewellyn (real name Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd) was a British novelist.
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Llewellyn was born of Welsh parents in Hendon, north London in 1906. Only after his death was it discovered that his claim that he was born in St. Davids, West Wales was false, though of course he was of Welsh blood.
Several of his novels dealt with a Welsh theme, the best-known being How Green Was My Valley (1939), which won international acclaim and was made into a classic Hollywood film. It immortalised the way of life of the South Wales Valleys coal mining communities, where Llewellyn spent a small amount of time with his grandfather. Three sequels followed.
He lived a peripatetic life, travelling widely throughout his life. Before World War II, he -
Anna Gmeyner
Anna Wilhelmine Gmeyner was an exiled German and Austrian author, playwright and scriptwriter, who is now best known for her novel Manja (1939). She also wrote under the names Anna Reiner, and Anna Morduch. Her daughter was the children's writer Eva Ibbotson.
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Catherine Carswell
Catherine Roxburgh Carswell (née Macfarlane) was a Scottish author, biographer and journalist, and a contributor to the Scottish Renaissance. Her work is considered an integral part of Scottish women's writing of the early 20th century.
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The daughter of a Glasgow merchant, Carswell was educated at the Park School. From 1901 to 1903 she attended classes in English Literature at Glasgow University. She went on to study music at the Schumann Conservatorium in Frankfurt am Main before taking up employment as reviewer and dramatic critic at the Glasgow Herald from 1907 until 1915. She was subsequently an assistant theatre critic for the Observer.
Carswell's first marriage, to Herbert Jackson in 1903, was annulled in 1908, and in 1915 she married Do -
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. -
Diana Tutton
Diana Tutton was born Dinah Godfrey-Faussett-Osborne, the youngest of four daughters. She was brought up at Pipe Hill House, Lichfield, and on the family estate in Kent.
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She married Captain John Tutton during the Second World War. They lived in Kenya for three years and in Malaya for two three-year stints, otherwise living in England. They had two daughters. She wrote three novels, all published during the 1950s. -
Jocelyn Playfair
Playfair was born in Lucknow in the year that her father, Lieutenant-Colonel Noel Malan, accompanied the Younghusband expedition to Tibet. Both her parents were descended from the highly artistic French Huguenot Malan family. She lived with her husband in India in the early 1930s but returned to Britain after the birth of their two sons. Her first book (a thriller) appeared in 1939 and she wrote three other novels before publishing what is perhaps her best known novel, A House in the Country in 1944. She stopped writing in the 1950s.
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E.M. Ward
See also Edith Marjorie Ward.
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E.M. (Edith Marjorie) Ward was a novelist and geographer whose work often focused on the Lake District which she made her home, living in Grasmere for much of her life. Her novels set in the Lake District, other parts of North-East Britain, and Switzerland are long overdue rediscovery. -
Elizabeth Anna Hart
Also wrote under the name Fanny Wheeler Hart.
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Born in London in 1822, Elizabeth Anna Hart was the daughter of a clergyman, critic and poet. Her aunt was Lewis Carroll's grandmother. She married an officer in the Indian Army, but had no children. She is perhaps best remembered for the children's story, The Runaway (1872), and for the adult novel Mrs Jerningham's Journal. She died in 1890.
From: Persephone Books. -
Jim Minick
Jim Minick is the author of five books, including the novel Fire Is Your Water (Ohio UP, 2017), and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family (St. Martin’s, 2012), winner of the SIBA Best Nonfiction Book of the Year Award. Minick has also written a collection of essays, Finding a Clear Path, two books of poetry, Her Secret Song and Burning Heaven, and he edited All There Is to Keep by Rita Riddle. His honors include the Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian Writing, and the Fred Chappell Fellowship at University of North Carolina-Greensboro. He has also won awards from the Southern Independent Booksellers Association, Southern Environmental Law Center, The Virginia College Bookstore Association, Appalachian Writers Association, Appa
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