Patricia Wentworth

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PW began her writing career early in the twentieth century with half a dozen historical novels and romances and went on to achieve great popularity with between sixty and seventy thrillers, mysteries, and detective novels. She is a sharp observer of social comedy including relationships between the sexes, and her ability to evoke fear and suspense continued to develop throughout her career. She also wrote a book of verse for children and a couple of other poetry volumes. She is notable for inventing, before Agatha Christie 's Miss Marple, an elderly female detective whose success is linked to the invisibility and apparent cosiness conferred by her sex and age.

Milestones

1877

Dora Amy Elles (who later wrote as PW ) was born at Mussoorie in India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, one of at least three children in her family.
The website of Dean Street Press , which has recently re-issued more than thirty of her novels, says that the birth-date she is often given, 1878, is wrong.
Dean Street Press. http://www.deanstreetpress.co.uk/.
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.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
“Officers Died of Natural Causes, Murdered, Accidental Deaths: Officers Died E”. Officers Died.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
77

By May 1910

PW , using the pseudonym of her entire writing career, published the historical novel A Marriage Under the Terror. The same year came A Child's Rhyme Book. From this date she issued almost one a year of six early novels.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. “A Marriage Under the Terror”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 435, p. 174.
174
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.

By 17 October 1928

PW provided a melodramatic first appearance in Grey Mask for her female detective, the elderly, single, dowdy, but brilliant Miss Maud Silver.
Contemporary Authors mistakenly asserts that Miss Silver first appeared in The Red Lacquer Case, 1924, and that she was a character in all the detective novels it lists, which is not the case. Many sources wrongly spell her name Maude.
Punch. Punch Publications.
175 (1928): 448

1961

PW 's thirty-second and final Miss Silver mystery, The Girl in the Cellar (whose plot is particularly involved) appeared in the year of her death.
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.
Wentworth, Patricia. The Girl in the Cellar. Hodder and Stoughton.
cover

28 January 1961

PW died, well on in her eighties.
Who Was Who in Literature, 1906-1934. Gale Research.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.

Biography

Birth and Family

1877

Dora Amy Elles (who later wrote as PW ) was born at Mussoorie in India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, one of at least three children in her family.
The website of Dean Street Press , which has recently re-issued more than thirty of her novels, says that the birth-date she is often given, 1878, is wrong.
Dean Street Press. http://www.deanstreetpress.co.uk/.
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.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
“Officers Died of Natural Causes, Murdered, Accidental Deaths: Officers Died E”. Officers Died.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
77