Ruth Augusta King was the daughter of a vicar in a Nottinghamshire mining village. After school in Yorkshire, she taught for five years, before marrying the journalist Kenneth Adam and moving with him…
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 Co…
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre i…
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…
Violet Elizabeth Vandyke was born on 10 November 1903 in Calcutta, British Raj, daughter of British parents, Elizabeth Lynch and Frederick Reginald Vandyke, a colonial officer. During the Great War sh…
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…
Barbara Comyns was educated mainly by governesses until she went to art schools in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Her father was a semi-retired managing director of a Midland chemical firm. She was o…
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 sa…
By the outbreak of the First World War, Robert ”Bob” Cedric Sherriff had left school and begun work as a clerk at the Sun Fire Office, the same company as his father. Although his employers preferred …
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. H…
Frances Faviell (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London under the aegis of Leon Underwood. In 1930 she married a Hung…
Molly Clavering was born in Glasgow, but lived in the country from an early age. After six years' service wiith the WRNS, she settled in Moffat, Dumfriesshire, where she served on t…
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, better known by his pen name E. T. A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, d…
Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the HISTORY Channel’s show Pawn Stars, and…