Enid Bagnold experienced both dazzling successes and spectacular flops in the course of her writing career, which spanned much of the twentieth century. Her best-known works are
National Velvet (1935), popularized as a novel for children though it was meant for adults, and
The Chalk Garden, a long-running play first performed in 1955. In addition to novels and plays, Enid Bagnold wrote a World War One memoir, two volumes of poetry, a children's book, an autobiography, and several articles (one of them notorious). Her works are often set in an upper-class milieu and make use of deliberately stilted language, eccentric characters, and absurd situations. While feminists must enjoy her unconventional female characters, especially older women and teenagers, her treatment of racial issues and homosexuality has caused offence.
Milestones
27 October 1889 EB was born at
Rochester in
Kent, the first of two children in her family.
April 1935 EB published
National Velvet, a novel whose teenage heroine disguises herself as a boy to ride in, and win, the Grand National, a steeplechase which then and for long afterwards was barred to women.
15 December 1944 The film adaptation of EB's
National Velvet, starring the young and then unknown
Elizabeth Taylor, premiered at Radio City Music Hall in
New York. It opened in Britain the same month.
December 1978 A volume of EB's
Poems was published by Whittington, John Randle's private press in
Gloucestershire.
31 March 1981 At the age of ninety-one, EB died of bronchopneumonia in
London.
