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JANET LAING (1870-1953)
(née Carstairs)
Author of eight light popular novels 1903-1929,
including The Wizard's Aunt (1903),
The Borderlanders (1904), Before the Wind (1918), The Man with the Lamp (1919), Wintergreen (1921), The Honeycombers (1922), The Moment More (1924), and The Villa Jane (1929). Before the Wind appears to be an
energetic comedy about a young girl serving as companion to two eccentric
women in wartime Scotland, while Wintergreen
deals with a middle-aged servant who, having survived the sinking of the Lusitania, decides to begin a new life
in the immediate postwar period.
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MARGARET LANE
(1906-1994)
(married names Wallace and
Hastings)
Biographer, children’s author, and novelist, known
for biographies of Beatrix Potter and the Brontës, and for novels including Faith,
Hope, No Charity (1935, winner of the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse), At
Last the Island (1937), A Crown of Convolvulus (1954). and A
Calabash of Diamonds (1961). Where Helen Lies (1944) provides
polished romantic melodrama (from the sound of a contemporary review) set
against the backdrop of the war, and Walk into My Parlor (1941), about
a bogus spiritualist, was published during the war and is set in London, but
could be set in earlier years.
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MARGHANITA LASKI (1915-1988)
(full name Esther Pearl
Laski, married name Howard)
A major Persephone rediscovery, Laski wrote six
diverse novels—Love on the Supertax (1944),
To Bed with Grand Music (1946), Tory Heaven (1948, inexplicably published
in the US as Toasted English), Little Boy Lost (1949), The Village
(1952), and The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953). All but the last of
these deal explicitly with the war and its aftermath. Love on the Supertax is a light tale of class and the black market,
while To Bed with Grand Music,
originally published pseudonymously, is a darker tale of a young wife whose
husband is serving abroad, whose boredom leads her into a series of affairs. Tory Heaven is a rollicking satire of
the class system, told via a group of castaways rescued after the war, who
find that the old class distinctions have now been codified as law. Little Boy Lost is about a father
searching for his missing son in postwar France, and The Village (my personal favorite of Laski's novels) is about the
aftermath of the war's breakdown of class relations, in the form of two
families—an upper crust family and that of their former housekeeper—who have
to come to terms with being united by marriage.
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NELLA LAST (1889-1968)
(née Lord)
Housewife who
wrote for Mass Observation; her World War II diaries, published as Nella Last's War (1981), are important
records of home front life. Her diaries of the postwar years have also been
published, as Nella Last's Peace
(2008) and Nella Last in the 1950s
(2010). Last's diaries are particularly interesting in the way they bring to
life how war work offered a degree of liberation and purpose to women, which
wasn't always fulfilled once the war was over.
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MARY LEE (dates unknown)
More
research needed; author of a
novel, 'It's a Great War!' Reality of
Actual Experience (1929), but no other information seems to be available.
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MOLLY LEFEBURE
(1919-2013)
Journalist,
novelist, and biographer best known for Evidence
for the Crown (1954), a memoir of working in the London morgue during
WWII, dramatized a few years ago as Murder
on the Home Front. Lefebure returned to her war memories in writing her
only novel, Blitz! (1988).
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ROSAMOND [NINA] LEHMANN
(1901-1990)
(married names Runciman
and Philipps)
Now
sometimes compared to Woolf or Bowen, Lehmann was seen in her lifetime as a
quintessentially middlebrow writer; her novels include Dusty Answer
(1927), The Weather in the Streets (1936), The Ballad and the
Source (1944), and The Echoing Grove (1953). According to the Guardian, "[w]ar looms
large" in her story collection, The
Gypsy's Baby and Other Stories (1946). Her one wartime novel, The
Ballad and the Source, was set in the years before World War I, but The Echoing Grove (1953) is very much
a novel of the postwar, and includes flashbacks to the Blitz & wartime
conditions.
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ANITA LESLIE (1914-1985)
(married name King, aka Anne Leslie)
Successful
biographer known for Jennie: The Life
of Lady Randolph Churchill (1969), about Winston Churchill's mother,
Leslie twice earned the French Croix de Guerre as an ambulance driver in
World War II. Her sometimes harrowing experiences are described in her
memoirs Train to Nowhere (1948) and
A Story Half Told (1983).
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DORIS LESLIE (1891-1982)
(née Oppenheim, second
married name Hannay)
Author of numerous romantic and historical novels
from the 1920s-1970s, including Puppets
Parade (1932), Concord in Jeopardy
(1938), and That Enchantress
(1950). Polonaise (1943) was a
success during the war, but was historical in themes. Only House in the Dust (1942) seems to
qualify her for this list, and just barely at that. It too is primarily
historical—my notes about it say that only about 8 pages, in which the
"spunky female lead, now elderly, comes to view the ruins of her old
house," are set during wartime.
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LORNA LEWIS (1910?-1962)
Primarily known as a children's author, her novel Tea and Hot Bombs (1943) has gained
some attention in recent years for its portrayal of the Blitz. Feud in the Factory (1944) also deals
with wartime conditions. I haven't been able to track down an affordable copy
of either. Others include Marriotts Go
North (1949) and June Grey: Fashion
Student (1953). Presumably she is the same Lorna Lewis who served as
secretary and chauffeur to E. M. Delafield for a time.
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MAUDE [AMELIA] LITTLE
(1886-1956)
(married name Deuchar,
aka Herbert Tremaine)
Poet, playwright, and novelist under her own
name and her pseudonym. Her WWI play
The Handmaidens of Death (1919),
about women working in a munitions factory, was recently revived by the Southwark
Playhouse in London. The Feet of
the Young Men (1917) was intriguingly subtitled "A Domestic
War-Novel" and elsewhere there is a mention of Tremaine's having
written a "moving novel about unwilling conscripts," which could
be this one or could be her earlier work Those Who Declined (1915, listed in Worldcat as Two Who Declined). Other titles,
about which details are quite sketchy, include A Woman on the Threshold (1911), The Rose-Coloured Room (1915), Two Months (1919), The
Tribal God (1921), and Bricks and
Mortals (1924). Only The Tribal
God seems to exist in U.S. libraries, and is also available from Google
Books.
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MARGARET
LOCHERBIE-CAMERON (dates unknown)
More research needed; author of six girls' novels
of the 1940s and 1950s, some set in schools but most focused on mystery
elements; titles include Nicolette
Detects (1949)—which, as Sims and Clare put it, "uses the dregs of Second World War spy paranoia" in
its tale of evil Nazis infiltrating a school—Two and a Treasure Hunt (1950), Will Madam Step This Way? (1951), Nurse Kathleen (1952), and Nicolette
Finds Her (1953).
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ALICE LUNT (1919-1973)
Author of three school-related stories—Secret Stepmother (1959), Jeanette's First Term (1960), and Jeanette in the Summer Term (1962)—and
other children's fiction; Sims & Clare report that she also wrote adult
novels, but I was unable to locate them—perhaps under a pseudonym? Her novels
Tomorrow the Harvest (1955) and Eileen of Redstone Farm (1964) are
based on her experiences in the Women's Land Army during World War II.
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LILLIAN BOWES LYON
(1895-1949)
(aka D. J. Cotman)
A
popular poet in her day, Lyon
wrote in part about her disabilities as a result of illness and injuries from
the Blitz (a bus she was on was caught in an bomb blast and her leg severely
injured, finally having to be amputated just before the end of the war, and
she was further crippled by both diabetes and arthritis). She also worked
with Anna Freud caring for children traumatized by war. Lyon wrote two
novels, The Buried Stream (1929)
and, pseudonymously, The Spreading Tree
(1931).
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ROSE MACAULAY
(1881-1958)
Novelist, travel writer, and essayist, Macaulay
has the distinction of having written important novels about both World Wars.
Noncombatants and Others (1916) was
a highly-acclaimed pacifist novel during World War I, and The World My Wilderness (1950) is a
lovely story of post-World War II youth, focused on Barbary, a young girl who
has spent much of youth with the Maquis (French resistance guerillas) in
occupied France and must now adapt to normal life among the ruins of London.
Macaulay's early novel What Not: A
Prophetic Comedy (1919) was a satire based in part on her own experiences
as a civil servant during World War I, and her later short story, "Miss
Anstruther's Letters," deals with Macaulay's own experience of being
bombed out during World War II and her loss of a life's collection of
letters, books and papers. Various other articles and essays deal either
directly or peripherally with wartime issues. Macaulay is also known for her
hilarious final novel, The Towers of
Trebizond (1958), about tourism, culture shock and religious doubt. After
her death, several volumes of her letters appeared, including Letters to a Sister (1964), which
covers the World War II years and includes letters focused on wartime
conditions. Although Macaulay's non-fiction work The Pleasure of Ruins (1954) seems to focus entirely on
historical locations and not the ruins that remained a part of the London
landscape for many years after the war, one wonders if the latter played a
role in inspiring or at least informing the book.
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JEAN MACGIBBON
(1913-2002)
(née Howard, aka Jean
Howard)
Intriguing author of one highly-acclaimed novel
for adults, When the Weather's Changing
(1945), about the events of a farmer's wife's summer. Although this takes
place as the war is drawing to a close, it seems that the war remains more or
less in the background. MacGibbon then suffered a nervous breakdown and
thereafter turned mainly to children's fiction, including the school story Pam Plays Doubles (1962). Her late
memoir I Meant to Marry Him (1984)
details her decision at age thirteen that she would one day marry James
MacGibbon, a prominent London publisher, and covers their life in wartime and
her breakdown, which apparently occurred on VE Day.
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HELEN MACINNES
(1907-1985)
(married name Highet)
Bestselling author of spy novels. Several of her
earliest novels deal with World War II, while later works focus more on Cold
War themes. The acclaimed Assignment in
Brittany (1942) and While Still We
Live (1944) deal with the French and Polish resistance respectively. Above Suspicion (1941) and Horizon (1945) are also set during the
war. Some later works, such as Pray for
a Brave Heart (1955) and The
Salzburg Connection (1968), deal with wartime secrets that still provoke
adventures. MacInnes also wrote two lighter, humorous works—Rest and Be Thankful (1949) and Home Is the Hunter (1964).
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CECILY MACKWORTH
(1911-2006)
(married names Donckier de
Donceel and de Chabannes la Palice)
Journalist, novelist, and critic, author
of I Came Out of France (1941), an
acclaimed first-hand account of the Nazi invasion of France and her own
escape back to England, about which the Orlando Project said that it
"vividly describes her own adventures and tribulations: crushed in a car
whose springs were dragging on the ground, walking deserted roads alone in
the black of night, losing her identity papers under the rubble of bombing,
nearly being lynched as a spy by a group of peasants and Belgian women
refugees, struggling by fair means or foul to obtain from a succession of
goaded and frantic petty bureaucrats some papers to enable her to leave first
southern France, then Spain, then Portugal." A later work of journalism,
The Mouth of the Sword (1948),
dealt with the Middle East in the aftermath of the war. Mackworth later wrote
two novels, Spring's Green Shadow
(1952) and Lucy's Nose (1992).
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CATHERINE MACDONALD
MACLEAN (c1891-1960)
A prominent biographer of William and Dorothy
Wordsworth and of William Hazlitt, Maclean also published several works of
fiction, including Seven for Cordelia
(1941), Three for Cordelia (1943), The Tharrus Three (1943), and Farewell to Tharrus (1944). I know
little about these works, but one source called The Tharrus Tree "[a] heart-warming story of human kindness
in a world at war."
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SARAH BROOM
MACNAUGHTON (1864-1916)
Nurse, diarist, and novelist of "intelligent,
humorous, mildly feminist fiction" (according to OCEF), including The
Fortune of Christina M'Nab (1901), The
Three Miss Graemes (1908), and Four-Chimneys
(1912). Macnaughton was a nurse during the Boer War and World War I, and was
on her way to Russia where she intended to provide medical assistance when
she fell ill. She returned to England, but died soon after. She wrote about
her wartime experiences in A Woman's
Diary of the War (1915), My War
Experiences in Two Contintents (1919), and her final, unfinished memoir, My Canadian Memories (1920).
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ADELAIDE FRANCES OKE MANNING (1891-1959)
(aka Manning Coles, aka Francis Gaite [both with
Cyril Henry Coles])
Popular
author (with Coles) of humorous mystery novels featuring Tommy Hambledon,
beginning with Drink to Yesterday
(1940), and of several satirical ghost stories starting with Brief Candles (1954). Several books in
the Hambledon series take place during World War II and in its immediate
aftermath. Pray Silence (1940,
published in the U.S. as A Toast to
Tomorrow) begins in 1933 and traces the rise of the Nazis and
preparations for war. Without Lawful
Authority (1943) takes place around the time of the Munich Crisis. Green Hazard (1945) and The Fifth Man (1946) are spy stories
set during the thick of the war, and A
Brother for Hugh (1947, published in the U.S. as With Intent to Deceive) takes place immediately after the war and
deals with ex-Nazi criminals. [Thanks to Jerri Chase for providing me with
these details.]
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OLIVIA [MARY] MANNING
(1908-1980)
(married name Smith, aka O.
M. Manning, aka Jacob Morrow)
Novelist
best known for two semi-autobiographical trilogies about a young couple in
World War II, The Balkan Trilogy—comprised
of The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962), and Friends and Heroes (1965)—and The Levant Trilogy (comprised of The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978), and The Sum of Things (1980), collectively
known as "Fortunes of War" after the title of a BBC dramatization.
Her earlier novels included Artist
Among the Missing (1949), about a painter scarred by his war experiences.
Her story collection, Growing Up
(1948), includes several stories written during and immediately after the
war—in particular, "Twilight of the Gods," set in 1946, evokes the
exhaustion of the immediate postwar.
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HILDE [EDILE] MARCHANT (c1913-1970)
(married names Brewer and James)
A
trail-blazing journalist for
the Daily Mail, Marchant also
published two significant books on the war—Women and Children Last: A Woman Reporter's Account of the Battle of
Britain (1941) and The Home Front
(1942); she had earlier made her name reporting on the Spanish Civil War.
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ANNE MARRECO (1912-1982)
(née Acland-Troyte, earlier married names Grosvenor,
Hoare, and Wignall, aka Alice Acland)
Best
known for her biography The Rebel Countess:
The Life and Times of Constance Markievicz (1967), she also published
eight novels 1954-1975, most using her pseudonym; titles include Templeford Park (1954), A Stormy Spring (1955), The Boat Boy (1964), The Corsican Ladies (1974), and The Secret Wife (1975). A Person of Discretion (1958), one of
her Acland novels, is about three sisters from Brussels who get mixed up with
the black market and the Resistance movement late in World War II.
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MONICA MARSDEN (dates
unknown)
(née ?????)
Author of numerous children's adventure tales and
mysteries, including one—The Chartfield
School Mystery (1959)—set in a school; others include Night Adventure (1941), Lost, Stolen or Strayed (1943), The Abbey Ruins (1944), and The Manor House Mystery (1950).
Presumably, Enemy Agent (1942) and
perhaps some of her other wartime works incorporated the war into their
adventures.
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EILEEN MARSH (1900-1948)
(married name Heming, aka
numerous pseudonyms, including Dorothy Carter, James Cahill, Eileen Heming,
Rupert Jardine, and Mary St. Helier)
Enormously
prolific writer of children's and adult fiction, including adventure stories,
Mistress of the Air (1942), We Lived in London (1942), about a
working class family in the Blitz, and additional wartime novels such as A Walled Garden (1943) and Eight Over Essen (1943).
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VERA LAUGHTON MATHEWS (1888–1959)
(full name Elvira Sibyl Marie Mathews, née Laughton)
Director
of the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) during World War II, for which she received the DBE, Mathews
published a significant memoir of her experiences, called Blue Tapestry (1948).
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ANNE MAYBURY
(c1901-1993)
(pseudonym of Edith
Arundel, married name Buxton, aka Edith Arundel, aka Katherine Troy)
Author of romance and
romantic suspense novels; early works include Love Triumphant (1932), Catch
at a Rainbow (1935), Arise, Oh Sun (1940), and A Lady Fell in
Love (1943), though she is best known for late novels like The Minerva
Stone (1968) and Ride a White Dolphin (1971). Arise, Oh Sun,
at least, seems to have some wartime themes. Other wartime titles include All
Enchantments Die (1941), To-Day We Live (1942), A Lady Fell in
Love (1943), Journey Into Morning (1944), and The Valley of
Roses (1945).
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IRENE RUTHERFORD MCLEOD (1891-1968)
(married name de Sélincourt)
Primarily
known as a poet (and mother-in-law of Christopher Robin Milne), McCleod also
published two novels, Graduation
(1918), about the coming of age of a young woman, and Towards Love (1923), about a conscientious objector in WWI;
contemporary reviews found them humorless and sentimental.
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CLARA MILBURN (1883–1961)
(née Bagnall)
Diarist
whose World War II diaries, published as Mrs.
Milburn's Diaries (1979), provide an important record of domestic life in
Coventry during the war—including her experience of the terrible air raids on
Coventry and the news that her son is missing in action after Dunkirk.
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CONSTANCE MILES
(1881-1962)
(full name Isa Constance
Miles, née Nicoll, aka Marjory Damon, aka Marjory Royce)
Journalist and author of children's books
(including some with Barbara Euphan Todd) and at least two adult novels—Lady Richard in the Larder (1932) and Coffee, Please (1933), about a future
in which coffee-making is a precious skill. Her WWII diary was published in
2013 as Mrs. Miles's Diary, and Lyn
at I
Prefer Reading discussed it late last year.
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BETTY MILLER (1910-1965)
Author of seven novels—The Mere Living (1933), Sunday
(1934), Portrait of the Bride
(1936), Farewell Leicester Square (1941), A Room in Regent's Park (1942), On the Side of the Angels
(1945), and The Death of the
Nightingale (1948)—only two of which have ever been reprinted. On the
Side of the Angels, first
revived by Virago in the 1980s and now avalable from Capuchin, deals
powerfully with gender roles as revealed by wartime experiences. Her earlier
novel, Farewell Leicester Square, was written several years before the
war, but was rejected by her publisher. Its exploration of anti-Semitism in
the British film industry and in larger society became more urgently relevant
with the rise of the Nazis, however, and the book was finally published in
1941. It is now available from Persephone. Miller's other novels of the war
years, A Room in Regent's Park and The Death of the Nightingale both
appear to take place before the war.
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NAOMI MITCHISON
(1897-1999)
(née Haldane)
Politically engaged author whose writings about war were
often historical, such as The Conquered (1923) and her best-known
works, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) and The
Bull Calves. The Blood of the
Martyrs (1939), according to ODNB,
"attempted to draw parallels between Nero's treatment of early
Christians and Hitler's persecution of the Jews." Her
wartime diary, begun for Mass Observation in 1939, was published as Among
You Taking Notes (1985) and "reveals what is both a vivid social
document and a record of Mitchison's own reactions to the war she hated but
knew must be fought" (ODNB).
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NANCY MITFORD
(1904-1973)
(married name Rodd)
Novelist and biographer, known for the popular
social comedies The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold
Climate (1949), and for successful biographies such as Madame de
Pompadour (1953), Voltaire in Love (1957), and The Sun King (1966).
Pigeon Pie (1940) is a rather zany
spy story set in the earliest days of World War II.
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ALICE MOLONY (dates unknown)
Illustrator
and author of a single children's novel, Lion's
Crouch (1944), "an exciting story about spies in Cornwall", for
which she also provided illustrations; she also illustrated two works by
Kitty Barne.
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DOROTHEA MOORE (1880-1933)
Prolific
author of early girls' school and girls' adventure books, including Terry the Girl-Guide (1912), Septima, Schoolgirl (1915), Wanted, An English Girl (1916)—set in
Germany during WWI—A Nest of Malignants
(1919), Smuggler's Way (1924), and Sara to the Rescue (1932). Books to Treasure reprinted Wanted, An English Girl in 2014.
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EDITH MARY MOORE
(1873-c1938)
Author of philosophical novels with socialist
leanings, exploring gender roles, war, and urban life. Her works were
well-reviewed at the time, but have since been largely forgotten. Her novels Teddy R.N.D. (1917) and The Blind
Marksman (1920) deal with World
War I, though the Orlando Project notes that she had to rely entirely on her
imagination for her battle scenes. Other titles include The Lure of Eve (1909), A Wilful
Widow (1913), and The Defeat
of Woman (1935).
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ELINOR MORDAUNT
(1872-1942)
(pseudonym of Evelyn May
Clowes, married names Wiehe and Bowles, aka Jack Heron)
Prolific novelist and
travel writer. Nicola Beauman, in her book A Very Great Profession,
singled out The Family (1915) and The Park Wall (1916) for
their domestic interest. Other novels include A Ship of Solace (1912), The Rose of Youth (1915), Short
Shipments (1922), and Mrs. Van
Kleek (1933), as well as a memoir, Sinabada
(1937). Although actively publishing during World War I, Mordaunt seems to
have been solidly focused on Victorian settings in her fiction of that time.
Late in life, however, during World War II, Mordaunt published Blitz Kids (1941), which appears to
have been a humorous look at children in wartime. She published several more
novels just before her death as well, about which information is sparse—it's
possible that Here Too Is Valour
(1941), Tropic Heat (1941), This Was Our Life (1942), and/or To Sea! To Sea! (1943) also deal with
the war.
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JOAN MORGAN (1905-2004)
Silent
film actress turned novelist, who wrote Camera! (1940), a portrait of
the early British film industry, Citizen of Westminster (1940), set at
London’s Dolphin Square, Ding Dong Dell (1943), about wartime
refugees, and The Lovely and the Loved (1948).
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EMMELINE MORRISON (1884-????)
Author
of nearly 70 light (and apparently very successful) novels 1921-1970,
described as romances but perhaps a bit Cadell-esque; Red Poppies (1928) is about a woman spy in WWI; The Last of the Lovells (1928), Countisbury: A Romance of South Devon
(1933), and An Open Secret (1939)
are interconnected; and her dustjackets are often irresistible. Some of her
WWII-era novels, such as The Quentins
(1940), Castle Ormonde (1940), Miss England (1942), Sea Spray (1943), and Knight Without Glory (1945), may well
have wartime themes, but I don't yet have details.
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PATRICIA MOYES (1923-2000)
(née Pakenham-Walsh, later married name Haszard)
Mystery
writer whose novels usually feature Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Henry
Tibbett and his wife Emmy, whose close relationship add depth to the series;
titles include Dead Men Don't Ski
(1959), The Sunken Sailor (1961), Murder a la Mode (1963), and The Curious Affair of the Third Dog
(1973). Though all of her works appeared well after World War II, her 1965
mystery Johnny Under Ground (1965)
makes prominent retrospective use of Emmy's wartime experiences (based on
Moyes' own in the Radar Section of the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force),
as Emmy's attendance at a reunion of her wartime colleagues leads Henry to
investigate the suspicious death of a Battle of Britain pilot.
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ROSALIND MURRAY
(1890-1967)
Author of
four early novels, including The Happy
Tree (1926, a Persephone reprint), about World War I, as well as Moonseed (1911), Unstable Ways (1914), and Hard
Liberty (1929); in later years, she published books about religion and
faith, including The Good Pagan's
Failure (1939).
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NORAH MYLREA (1904-1994)
(married name Easey)
Author of six girls' school stories, most with
thriller elements, as well as several other children's books; titles include Lisbeth of Browndown (1934), Browndown Again! (1936), Unwillingly to School (1938), That Mystery Girl (1939), Lorrie's First Term (1940), and Spies at Candover (1941). The last is
set in an evacuated school.
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JENNY [PRYDE] NICHOLSON (1919-1964)
(née Nicholson Graves, married names Clifford and
Crosse)
Daughter of Robert Graves and artist Nancy
Nicholson; journalist and author of Kiss
the Girls Goodbye: On Life in the Women's Services (1944), regarding
women's roles during WWII, and co-author of a travel book about the Soviet
Union, The Sickle and the Stars
(1948); she and her second husband, Reuters manager Patrick Crosse, lived in
Rome for many years.
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BARBARA NIXON (1908-????)
(married name Dobb)
Wife
of Cambridge economist Maurice Dobb and actress in the Cambridge Festival
Theatre, Nixon was an air raid warden during the Blitz and wrote dramatically
of her experiences in Raiders Overhead
(1943); the British Library credits her with another title as well, Jinnifer of London (1948).
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BARBARA NOBLE (1907-2001)
Head of the London office of Doubleday for many
years, Noble published six novels of her own, including the powerful Doreen (1946, reprinted by
Persephone), about a young evacuee in World War II, which makes excellent use
of Noble's interest in child psychology. The
House Opposite (1943) deals with an illicit love affair in London during
the Blitz. Noble's other novels are The
Years That Take the Best Away (1929), The
Wave Breaks (1932), Down by the
Salley Gardens (1935), and Another
Man's Life (1952).
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MARY NORTON (1903-1992)
(née Pearson)
Best
known for the Borrowers series of
children’s books (1952-1982), Norton’s early novels The Magic Bed-knob (1943) and Bonfires
and Broomsticks (1947), are of interest to me first because they focus on
a spinster who is learning to be a witch, but also because they are set
during wartime. The former includes a scene in London, where the main
character and her young charges get into trouble in the blackout. These
novels were (more or less) the source of Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Virago issued some of her other work as
Bread and Butter Stories.
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KATE O'BRIEN (1897-1974)
Playwright
and novelist who often focused on Irish family life; novels (most available
from Virago) include Without My Cloak
(1931), The Anteroom (1934), Mary Lavelle (1936), The Land of Spices (1941), The Last of Summer (1943), That Lady (1946), and The Flower of May (1953). Of O'Brien's
wartime titles, The Land of Spices
is set in the early years of the 20th century and That Lady is set even further back in history. Only The Last of Summer seems to make use
of the war at all—set during a two week period in late summer of 1939, just
as the war is beginning and causing dilemmas for the characters of its social
drama.
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JANE OLIVER (1903-1970)
(pseudonym of Helen
Christine Rees, née Easson Evans, aka Joan Blair [with Ann Stafford])
Author
of more than two dozen novels, most historical, from the 1930s-1970s,
including Tomorrow's Woods (1932), Mine
is the Kingdom (1937), The
Hour of the Angel (1942), In No Strange Land (1944), Crown for
a Prisoner (1953), and Queen Most Fair (1959). The Hour of the
Angel is a Blitz novel, whose main character's husband is in the RAF. In
No Strange Land appears to be primarily historical but perhaps end with
the war? Hartley says of it: "Sometimes it seems as though all roads
must lead to war and even a novel starting in Biblical times finishes in the
RAF." Oliver's concern for the RAF was personal—her husband, John
Llewellyn Rhys, had been in the RAF and had been killed in 1940. She later
initiated the literary prize bearing his name.
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EDITH OLIVIER
(1872-1948)
Author of five quirky, underrated novels—The Love-Child (1927), As Far as Jane's Grandmother's (1929),
The Triumphant Footman (1930), Dwarf's Blood (1931), and The Seraphim Room (1932), as well as a
wonderfully odd memoir, Without Knowing
Mr. Walkley (1938). In World War I, Olivier had helped to organize the
Women's Land Army, for which she was appointed MBE in 1920, though sadly she
does not appeared to have written about those experiences. During World War
II, however, Olivier published the somewhat autobiographical Night-Thoughts of a Country Landlady
(1943), a short work about the elderly Emma Nightingale's experiences and
thoughts about the war. More of Olivier's reflections on the war are included
in From Her Journals, 1924-1948
(1989). Happily, most of Olivier's works have now been made available again
by Bello Books.
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CAROLA OMAN (1897-1978)
(née Lenanton, aka C.
Lenanton)
Biographer
and historical novelist, known for bios of Elizabeth of Bohemia, Walter
Scott, and others, Oman also wrote several historical novels including The
Road Royal (1924), Miss
Barrett's Elopement (1929), Major Grant (1931), Over the Water
(1935), and Nothing to Report (1940). The last seems to be a domestic
novel set in the early days of World War II.
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URSULA ORANGE
(1909-1955)
(married name Tindall)
Forgotten
author of six novels, at least two of which are richly deserving of
rediscovery. Her debut, Begin Again (1936),
is an imperfect but fascinating look at the anticlimactic working and family
lives of several young girls after their heady days at Oxford, and its
sociological value alone—not to mention that it's quite entertaining—makes it
worthy of reprinting. To Sea in a Sieve
(1937) is a frothy, if rather forgettable, comedy about unconventional young
love. But Tom Tiddler's Ground
(1941, published in the U.S. as Ask Me
No Questions), is Orange's masterpiece, a wonderfully entertaining
wartime tale of a young mother evacuated to the countryside who snoops into
village affairs. Reminiscent of D. E. Stevenson or Margery Sharp at their
best, it's an outrage that it remains out of print (imho, of course!).
Orange's follow-up, Have Your Cake
(1942), has a tantalizing title but is virtually nonexistent outside of
British libraries and I can find no details about it. Company in the Evening (1944), also about discordant housemates
in wartime, is certainly interesting in its own right, but it's completely
different in tone, a bit darker and with the sense of fatigue and jadedness
common in fiction from late in the war—with the result that it's neither as
entertaining nor as cohesive as Tom
Tiddler's Ground. Portrait of
Adrian (1945), described by one source as a "psychological
drama," rounded out Orange's novels. She seems to have dealt with severe
depression in the years after, and sadly died by her own hand in 1955.
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IRIS [MARGARET] ORIGO
(1902-1988)
(née Cutting)
Biographer of prominent Italian figures, who
remained in Italy during World War II, helping refugee children and later
escaped Allied prisoners of war, a time she discussed in her memoir, War in Val d'Orcia (1947); she also
published one children's book, Giovanni
and Jane (1950).
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CHRISTINE [GRANT MILLAR]
ORR (1899-1963)
Poet, playwright, and author of more than a
dozen mostly Scottish-themed novels, including The Glorious Thing (1919), Kate
Curlew (1922), The House of Joy (1926),
Hogmanay (1928), Artificial Silk (1929), Hope Takes the High Road (1935), and Flying Scotswoman (1936). The Glorious Thing is set in Scotland
during World War I, and is discussed a bit here.
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MOLLIE PANTER-DOWNES
(1906-1997)
(full name Mary Patricia
Panter-Downes, married name Robinson)
Novelist,
biographer, and author of New Yorker’s
"Letter from London" from 1939 to 1984. Panter-Downes wrote five
novels, all of which she later disowned except for the last, One Fine Day
(1947), available from Virago, which evokes Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway in lushly detailing a
single ordinary day in the life of a woman—with the difference that
Panter-Downes' story is set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Her
charming and fascinating New Yorker pieces
from the war years were collected as London
War Notes 1939-1945 (1971), which happily will be reprinted by Persephone
in early 2015. She also published numerous short stories in the New Yorker, many of which were collected
by Persephone as Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories (1999)
and Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories (2002).
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EDITH [MARY] PARGETER
(1913-1995)
(aka Ellis Peters, aka
Peter Benedict, aka Jolyon Carr, aka John Redfern)
Novelist and author of the Brother Cadfael and
George Felse mysteries. Her early novel She
Goes to War (1942) is based on her own experiences in the WRNS and paints
an often vivid and detailed picture. Her trilogy The Eighth Champion of
Christendom—comprised of The
Lame Crusade (1945), Reluctant Odyssey (1946), and Warfare
Accomplished (1947)—follows a young man from an English village
who experiences warfare and returns home a changed man. Some of Pargeter's
later novels, such as Lost Children
(1951) and Means of Grace (1956)
make use of postwar moods and characters rebuilding their lives.
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FRANCES PARTRIDGE
(1900-2004)
(née Marshall)
A
20th century Samuel Pepys, Partridge is known for her diaries, beginning with
A Pacifist's War (1978), detailing her wartime experiences with
husband Ralph Partridge, as the two faced hostility and resistance from
strangers and friends alike due to their pacifism. Subsequent volumes of the
diaries (seven in all if my count is correct) follow her life all the way up
to 1975. Partridge's memoir, Love in Bloomsbury: Memories (1981), is
wonderfully entertaining, and in part details the complicated relationship of
the Partridges with painter Dora Carrington and writer Lytton Strachey. She
also published a memoir of Persephone author Julia Strachey in 1983.
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WINIFRED PECK
(1882-1962)
(née Knox)
Novelist whose humorous House-Bound (1942,
reprinted by Persephone) is about a woman surviving without servants in
wartime Edinburgh; other works include Bewildering
Cares: A Week in the Life of a Clergyman's Wife (1940), a wonderful
humorous work (one of my favorite reads this year) set just at the beginning
of the war. Other wartime novels such as Tranquillity
(1944) and There Is a Fortress
(1945) may deal with the war as well, but information about them is sparse. Bewildering Cares is being reprinted in the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint by Dean Street Press.
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K. M. PEYTON (1929- )
(pseudonym of Kathleen
Wendy Herald Peyton, née Herald, aka Kathleen Herald) (children's)
Children’s author whose first book, Sabre, the Horse from the Sea (1947),
appeared when she was 18; best known for the Flambards series, beginning with
Flambards (1967), set in a
crumbling manor house in the early 20th century. Among other
historical events, these books also follow their characters through the
traumas of World War I. Several of Peyton’s titles have been reprinted by
Fidra.
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SHEILA PIM (1909-1995)
Also a popular writer on gardening, Pim is best
known for her four mystery novels, in particular Common or Garden Crime (1945), which vividly portrays wartime
life in an Irish village; the others are A
Brush With Death (1950), Creeping
Venom (1950), and A Hive of
Suspects (1952).
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JOCELYN PLAYFAIR
(1904-1996)
(née Malan)
Known now for her novel A House in the Country (1944, reprinted by Persephone), set
during World War II, Playfair also wrote nine other works of fiction, some of
which might also include wartime themes, including Storm in a Village (1940), Men
Without Armour (1946), The
Desirable Residence (1947), and The
Nettlebed (1952).
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DORIS POCOCK (1890-1974)
Poet and
children's author whose work includes girls' school stories such as The Head Girl's Secret (1927), mystery
stories like The Riddle of the Rectory
(1931), and World War II stories like Catriona
Carries On (1940) and Lorna on the
Land (1946), the latter about Land Girls.
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JESSIE POPE (1868-1941)
(married name Lenton)
Poet, humorist, editor of Robert Noonan's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists,
and author of two novels, The Tracy
Tubbses (1914), a humorous tale of married life, and Love on Leave (1919),
about a woman's love for an ANZAC soldier; she aroused controversy with the
overt propaganda of her WWI poems.
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EVADNE PRICE (ca.
1896-1985)
(married names Fletcher
and Attiwill, aka Helen Zenna Smith)
Children's
author, playwright, TV astrologer, and novelist; author of the vivid World
War I novel Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (1930),
the popular Jane stories for children (which include a couple of
wartime volumes), and romance novels including Society Girl, Glamour
Girl, and Air Hostess in Love. Four novels subsequent to Not So
Quiet deal with postwar life—Women of the Aftermath (1931), Shadow
Women (1932), Luxury Ladies (1933), and They Lived with Me
(1934).
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VIRGINIA PYE (1901-1994)
(née Kennedy)
Sister of
novelist Margaret Kennedy; children's author who specialized in holiday
adventure stories; titles include Red-Letter
Holiday (1940), Half-Term Holiday
(1943), The Prices Return (1946), The Stolen Jewels (1948), and Holiday Exchange (1953). She also
wrote one adult story collection, St.
Martin's Summer (1930). Of her children's fiction, Pye once wrote,
"I wrote my children's books during and after World War II. They have,
therefore, the background of war time and post-war England and in this sense
they are dated." But I know I'm not alone in preferring exactly that
kind of "datedness" in my reading.
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BARBARA [MARY CRAMPTON] PYM
(1913-1980)
Much loved author of humorous novels of domestic
and social life, often revolving around church and/or scholars, including Some Tame Gazelle (1950), Excellent Women (1952), A Glass of
Blessings (1958), and more serious late novels like Quartet in Autumn
(1977) and The Sweet Dove Died
(1978). Some of the early novels mention World War II and its aftereffects, but
the writing she did during the war was mostly only published decades later.
Her diaries, in particular, published in 1984, have gotten a lot of
attention, but some of the previously unpublished early writings collected in
Civil to Strangers (1987) also deal
with the war, including two novel fragments, Home Front Novel and a "spy story," So Very Secret.
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HERMIONE RANFURLY (1913-2001)
(née Llewellyn, married name Knox)
Diarist
and memoirist whose WWII diaries, To
War with Whitaker (1994), about her determination to follow her soldier
husband into the Middle East and Africa, are much recommended by readers of
this blog; she also published a memoir, The
Ugly One: The Childhood Memoirs of Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, 1913-1939
(1998).
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DOROTHY UNA RATCLIFFE (1887-1967)
(née Clough, later married names Phillips and Vowles
[in the latter case, her husband changed his name to Phillips to match hers])
Author
of poetry, plays, character studies, and apparently inaccurate memoirs,
Ratcliffe was best known for her poems and sketches in Yorkshire
dialect; one of her perhaps fictionalized memoirs is Mrs. Buffey in Wartime (1942).
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IRENE RATHBONE
(1892–1980)
Novelist
best known for We That Were Young
(1932), about women's war work in the First World War; the follow up, They Call it Peace (1936), is a bitter
tale of women rebuilding their lives after the war; others include Susan Goes East (1929), October (1934), and The Seeds of Time (1952).
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AMBER REEVES (1887-1981)
(married name Blanco
White)
Author
of widely varied nonfiction works, Reeves also wrote four novels about
women's roles and frustrations, including The Reward of Virtue (1911), A Lady and Her Husband
(1914), Helen in Love (1916), and Give and Take (1923). The
last, which takes place at the end of World War I, is reportedly based on
Reeves' own experiences in the Civil Service in wartime.
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MARY RENAULT (1905-1983)
(pseudonym of Eileen Mary
Challans)
Famous
for novels of ancient Greece from The Last of the Wine (1956) to Funeral
Games (1981), Renault also wrote novels with modern settings and
matter-of-fact portrayals of homosexuality. This is certainly true of The
Friendly Young Ladies (1944), about a lesbian couple in World War II, and
The Charioteer (1953), which deals
with a wounded soldier's triangular relationships with a conscientious
objector and a naval officer while in a hospital in the midst of blackout and
bombings. The North Face (1948),
meanwhile, according to Jenny Hartley, takes the main character's
predilection for rock-climbing as a symbol for life in the postwar years.
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GERTRUDE M[INNIE].
REYNOLDS (1861-1939)
(née Robins, aka Mrs.
Baillie-Reynolds)
Popular novelist whose publishing life extended
from the 1880s to the 1930s; titles include The Girl from Nowhere (1910), The
Notorious Miss Lisle (1911), and two rather melodramatic-sounding World
War I themed novels—The Lonely
Stronghold (1918), about a young bank employee who inherits a fortune and
is made unhappy by it, and Also Ran
(1920), about a Red Cross nurse whose love for a wounded officer is
threatened by a forced marriage to another man.
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JOAN [ODETTE] RICE (1919-2009)
(née Bawden)
Mother
of lyricist Tim Rice; her WWII diaries were published in 2006 as Sand in My Shoes: Wartime Diaries of a
WAAF; she also published numerous stories and humorous articles in the
1950s and 1960s, which have never been collected.
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MOLLY [ALISON MARY] RICH (????-1974)
(née Richardson)
Wife
of Edward Rich, a prominent vicar, Molly's entertaining World War II letters
have been collected as A Vicarage in
the Blitz: The Wartime Letters of Molly Rich 1940-1944 (2010). Lyn at I
Prefer Reading discussed it in early 2014.
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JESSIE LOUISA RICKARD (1876–1963)
(née Moore, earlier
married name Ackland, aka Mrs. Victor Rickard)
Prolific writer of both literary and light fiction,
including detective novels; titles include A
Reckless Puritan (1921), Blindfold
(1922), A Bird of Strange Plumage (1927), Sorel's Second Husband
(1932), and Shandon Hall (1950). The Light Above the Crossroads (1918)
deals with a young man who becomes a British spy despite his conflictedness
because his best friend is German. The Fire of Green Boughs (1918) is
also about conflictedness, as a compassionate young woman who takes in a
dying German finds herself arrested for aiding the enemy. And in The House
of Courage (1919), women working in a prisoner of war camp face similar
moral complexity.
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LYNETTE ROBERTS (1909-1995)
(full name Evelyn Beatrice Roberts, married name
Rhys)
Although
best known for her poetry—especially from the World War II years—Roberts'
wartime diaries, reminiscences of T. S. Eliot and the Sitwells, and short
stories were also published in 2008 and sound promising. Roberts also wrote
one novel during the war years, Nesta
(1944), which was never published and appears to have been lost.
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E[ILEEN]. ARNOT
ROBERTSON (1903-1961)
(pseudonym of Eileen
Arbuthnot Robertson, married name Turner)
Novelist known for three early novels reprinted by
Virago in the 1980s—Cullum (1928), Four Frightened People
(1931), set in the Malayan jungle, and Ordinary Families (1933), a
family comedy set in Suffolk. The
Signpost (1943) is about a wounded RAF pilot and his relationship with a
French woman in a remote Irish fishing village.
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JEAN ROSS (1907-1985)
(pseudonym of Irene Dale
Hewson)
Children's author and novelist; titles include Flowers
Without Sun (1938), Aunt Ailsa (1944), Jania (1948), A
Picnic by Wagonette (1953), The Great-Aunts (1964), and the
intriguing A View of the Island: A Post-Atomic Age Fairy Tale (1965).
Kate O'Brien, writing in the Spectator in 1945, said of Aunt Ailsa
that it "is a book about English family life between the last war and
the present time. It is like a great many such books, in being truthful,
matter-of-fact, humorous and likeable. Miss Ross has a steady eye for
character and an easy naturalistic way in dialogue, and a great many people
will derive entertainment from her unaffected exploitation of these talents."
Strangers Under Our Roof (1943) certainly sounds as though it might
deal with evacuees or refugees, two popular themes during the war, but I can
find little information about it.
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NAOMI [GWLADYS] ROYDE-SMITH
(1875-1964)
(originally Naomi Holroyd
Smith, married name Milton)
Prolific novelist, travel writer, and biographer, author of The
Delicate Situation (1931), set in the 1840s, and Jane Fairfax
(1940), a prequel to Austen’s Emma that mixes other characters—and
their creators—into the plot; others include The Tortoiseshell Cat (1925) and All Star Cast (1936). During World War II, Royde-Smith published Outside Information (1941), a book
with the voluminous subtitle, "Being a Diary of Rumours Collected by
Naomi Royde Smith; Together with Letters from Others and Some Account of
Events in the Life of an Unofficial Person in London and Winchester during
the Months of September and October 1940." Whew! I don't yet know enough
about Royde-Smith's work to tell if any of her wartime fiction, such as The Unfaithful Wife; or, Scenario for Gary
(1941) or Fire-Weed (1944), might
have reflected wartime concerns as well.
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HARRIET RUTLAND
(1901-1962)
(pseudonym of Olive Maude Shinwell,
née Seers)
Mystery
writer who published only three novels—Knock,
Murder, Knock! (1938), Bleeding
Hooks (1940, aka The Poison Fly
Murder), and Blue Murder
(1942)—characterized by a wonderfully dark sense of humor. Blue Murder takes place during
wartime, among an unsavory family whose members find themselves the targets
of a killer.
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