Enid Bagnold : the authorized biography

by Anne Sebba

This remarkable biography brings to life one of the most active and gifted women of her generation. Best known as the author of National Velvet and The Chalk Garden, Enid Bagnold was born in 1889 and was determined from an early age to have it all: literary acclaim, social success, motherhood, marriage and lovers. In Chelsea she painted with Sickert and was sculpted by Gaudier Brzeska. As a journalist, she worked with and was seduced by Frank Harris. Having worked as a VAD during the First World War, she wrote an expose of hospital cruelty which won her instant fame. Her marriage to Roderick Jones, head of Reuters, enabled her to combine motherhood and a glittering social life with the thrill and turmoil of a long and varied career on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the post-war film of National Velvet brought her international acclaim, her passion remained the theatre, involving such luminaries as Cecil Beaton, Edith Evans, Gladys Cooper, Irene Selznick, Charles Laughton and John Gielgud.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 1986

About the author

Anne Sebba began her writing career at the BBC world service, Arabic section, while still a student. After graduating from King’s College, London in Modern European History, she worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in London and Rome, the first woman Reuters accepted on their Graduate Trainee Scheme. In 1975 she moved to New York with her husband and first baby returning two years later with a second baby and first book. From then on she was launched into a freelance career as a journalist, biographer, cruise lecturer and occasional broadcaster and is now also an officially accredited Nadfas lecturer. She has worked for many writers’ organisations including PEN Writers in Prison Committee and the Society of Authors chairing its Management Committee from 2013- 2015 and followed her bestselling biography That Woman, a life of Wallis Simpson, based on the discovery of 15 secret letters which Wallis wrote to her second husband Ernest Simpson, with Les Parisiennes : How the Women of Paris lived, loved and died in the 1940s published in the UK and US in 2016.