Naomi Jacob

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NJ was a highly prolific, popular author, whose profitable writing career began in the 1920s and produced more than seventy books. The greater number are novels, including a notable series detailing for fortunes of an English Jewish family. Her fiction became steadily more formulaic with time. She also wrote plays, journalism, opera programme notes, and whatever came to hand. She issued several volumes of rambling memoirs which include much entertaining theatre reminiscence (every one of which has the word Me in its title) and a biography of Marie Lloyd . She was well-known on the stage in her earlier life, and later on as a broadcaster.
  • BirthName: Naomi Eleanor Claire Jacob
  • Nicknames: Micky or Mickie, La Signora Micky
    Yorksire people believed, when NJ was growing up, that Irish seasonal workers were dirty, so as a frequently grubby child she was called a proper Mick, and the name stuck, even in Italy.
    Jacob, Naomi. Me: A Chronicle about Other People. Hutchinson, 1933.
    42
    Bailey, Paul. Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob and Arthur Marshall. Hamish Hamilton (Penguin), 2001.
    79
    ; Jacob, Jake
    In contexts of work or politics she was often known as Jacob or even Jake.
    Jacob, Naomi. Me: A Chronicle about Other People. Hutchinson, 1933.
    138, 199

  • Pseudonym: Ellington Gray
  • Indexed: Naomi Ellington Jacob
    Most standard library catalogues list her (in 2011) under this name.

Milestones

1 July 1884

NJ was born at 20 High St Agnes Gate, Ripon, in Yorkshire, the elder of two sisters.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1923

NJ is said to have had a play staged entitled The Dawn. Like her later plays, it seems not to have been reached print.
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, 1990.

27 August 1964

NJ died at the age of eighty, at Sirmione on Lake Garda in Italy, where she had lived for upwards of thirty years.
Bailey, Paul. Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob and Arthur Marshall. Hamish Hamilton (Penguin), 2001.
182
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

By mid-June 1965

NJ 's Flavia appeared posthumously, advertised as her last great novel, following Yolanda in 1963 and Long Shadows in 1964.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
(17 June 1965): 493

Biography

Birth and Influences

1 July 1884

NJ was born at 20 High St Agnes Gate, Ripon, in Yorkshire, the elder of two sisters.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.