Ann Bridge was a twentieth-century novelist who began by exploiting the milieu of the
British Foreign Office community in
Peking in
China, where she lived for two years with her diplomat husband. Her novels combine courtship plots with vividly-realised settings and demure social satire. She went on to write novels which take as the background of their protagonists' emotional lives a serious investigation of modern historical developments (such as the leap by which
Turkey progressed from a feudal-style government to become a modern republic in which women enjoyed equality of rights and equality of opportunity). Ann Bridge also wrote thrillers centred on a female amateur detective, travel books, and family memoirs.
Milestones
11 September 1889 Mary Dolling Sanders (who later wrote as AB) was born at
Porters near
Shenley in
Hertfordshire, the seventh child of a seventh child (a fact in which she took some pleasure).
Early September 1911 AB wrote that she penned her first story, "Pepita's Miracle", on the
Isle of Mull off the coast of
Scotland immediately after hearing of her family's financial destitution
1973 Ann Bridge published her final Julia Probyn spy novel,
Julia in Ireland, in the
USA after her usual British publisher,
Chatto and Windus, had turned it down.
9 March 1974 Ann Bridge (Mary Anne O'Malley) died at the age of seventy-five of bronchial pneumonia, at her home in
Oxford.
