Enid Bagnold

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Standard Name: Bagnold, Enid
Birth Name: Enid Algerine Bagnold
Pseudonym: A Lady of Quality
Married Name: Enid Algerine Jones
Titled: Enid Algerine, Lady Jones
EB 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, EB 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.
Black and white photograph of Enid Bagnold in profile from the shoulders up. In one upraised hand she holds a cigarette. She wears a dark-coloured shirt with white around the collar and cuffs.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Vera Brittain
VB named her daughter after Charlotte Brontë 's character. The child Shirley Catlin was already a Roman Catholic , a role she later combined with that of social democrat. She came second to Elizabeth Taylor
Friends, Associates Lady Cynthia Asquith
Cynthia was also a friend of Viola Meynell and of Enid Bagnold , whose Sussex homes were close to that of the Asquiths during the Second World War. Thirkell, as well as Lawrence, Bagnold, and...
Literary responses Angela Thirkell
The book was reviewed for The Observer by Enid Bagnold , who was then living in the Rottingdean house. The Times review called it a very interesting little book . . . very well and...
Literary responses Vita Sackville-West
Critical response was disappointingly muted. Woolf particularly liked the poem addressed to Enid Bagnold , which includes the self-description, I, God's truth, a damned out-moded poet.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne TrautmannEditors , Hogarth Press, 1980.
5: 252n1
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
267
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
MW has specialized in adapting and abridging novels for radio. Between 1980 and 2004 she adapted a wide array of fiction by women writers, including works by Jane Austen , Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot
Textual Production Margery Lawrence
ML 's ghost stories have been frequently anthologised. They appear in, for instance, Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told (1937), The Virago Book of Ghost Stories: The Twentieth Century (1987), and Vampire Stories (1993).
Clute, John, and John Grant, editors. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. St Martin’s Press, 1997.
under Lawrence, Margery

Timeline

1934
Patricia Lynch published The Turf-Cutter's Donkey: one of a new wave of characterful books for children which also included P. L. Travers , Enid Bagnold , Noel Streatfeild , and Eve Garnett .