Ann Bridge

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AB 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). AB also wrote thrillers centred on a female amateur detective, travel books, and family memoirs.
  • BirthName: Mary Dolling Sanders
  • Nickname: Cottie
    Her family were great givers of nicknames; this was hers.

  • Self-constructed: Mary Anne
    AB was called Mary Anne as a girl, although Anne was not one of her baptismal names.
    Hoehn, Matthew, editor. Catholic Authors. St Mary’s Abbey, 1952.
  • Married: O'Malley; Mary O'Malley
    The was what her friends called her in adult life.
  • Pseudonym: Ann Bridge
    AB formed her pseudonym from her own chosen second name, Anne, and from Bridge End in Surrey, where she lived after she was married.
    Hoehn, Matthew, editor. Catholic Authors. St Mary’s Abbey, 1952.
    She kept this identity a closely guarded secret, and even under this shelter allowed the Foreign Office to scrutinise her novels before publication because of her husband 's Foreign Office career.

  • Titled: Lady
    After thirty years of marriage AB became Lady O'Malley when her husband received his knighthood.
  • Indexed: Mary Anne O'Malley

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).
Bridge, Ann. A Family of Two Worlds. Macmillan, 1955.
102, 17-18
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.

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
Bridge, Ann. A Family of Two Worlds. Macmillan, 1955.
221

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.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Family

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).
Bridge, Ann. A Family of Two Worlds. Macmillan, 1955.
102, 17-18
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.