Monica Dickens

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MD was a popular memoirist, novelist, journalist, and writer for children who was active from just before the Second World War until late in the twentieth century. Her fiction is usually closely bound up with reportage of the actual world, structured around localities, or social problems, or people whose lives are either representative or exceptional.
Black-and-white photo of Monica Dickens, circa 1954, reading her grandfather's "A Christmas Carol" to her children. Her hands are both reaching out and behind her is a Christmas tree and an unlit fireplace.

Milestones

10 May 1915

MD was born at 52 Chepstow Villas, Bayswater, London, the youngest of three children.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Dickens, Monica. An Open Book. Heinemann.
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1939

MD published her first book, One Pair of Hands, a personal memoir about her two years working as a cook-general (that is, a domestic servant who cooks, cleans, etc.) in a succession of twenty different households.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

May 1942

MD published One Pair of Feet, about her experience of working as a trainee hospital nurse.
British Book News. British Council.
(May 1942): 463

25 December 1992

MD died of bowel cancer, in her late seventies, in hospital at Reading in Berkshire.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1993

MD 's last novel, One of the Family, appeared posthumously: in it the humdrum, satisfactory life of one male character is transformed by another, first with excitement, then disaster.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

Biography

Birth and Family

10 May 1915

MD was born at 52 Chepstow Villas, Bayswater, London, the youngest of three children.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Dickens, Monica. An Open Book. Heinemann.
20

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