NM
was born into an upper-class English family and grew up in the Cotswolds. Much of her youth was spent living the privileged life of a young woman of her background. From the time that...
Education
J. K. Rowling
Formative early reading included Richard Scarry
and Kenneth Grahame
's The Wind in the Willows. Joanne Rowling did not care for Enid Blyton
as a young child but acquired a taste for her later...
Family and Intimate relationships
J. K. Rowling
Joanne Rowling
bore her first child, a daughter, in Porto and named her Jessica
(after Jessica Mitford
, she says).
Smith, Sean, b. 1955. J. K. Rowling. A Biography. Arrow, 2002.
132
Family and Intimate relationships
Nancy Mitford
Jessica
, the sister who followed Unity in age, eloped in her teens with a still younger cousin who was off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Nancy and her husband were despatched as...
Health
Nancy Mitford
At the end of 1968 (not long before Palewski
's marriage), NM
began to suffer from intense pain in her back and legs, which continued until her death; the symptoms were finally diagnosed as Hodgkin's...
Timeline
By early October 1963: Jessica Mitford published The American Way...
Women writers item
By early October 1963
Jessica Mitford
published The American Way of Death, a satirical work of social analysis. It opens by quoting an advertisement for shoes suitable for a successful man to be buried in.
September 1966: Martha Gellhorn published in The Guardian...
Writing climate item
September 1966
Martha Gellhorn
published in The Guardian (formerly the Manchester Guardian) six articles about the civilian angle in the Vietnam War: at that time something no one had thought to cover.
Fox, Lorna Scott. “No Intention of Retreating”. London Review of Books, 2 Sept. 2004, pp. 26-8.
28
Gellhorn, Martha. The Face of War. Virago, 1986.
prelims, 216n
23 July 1996: The English writer Jessica Mitford died in...
Women writers item
23 July 1996
The English writer Jessica Mitford
died in Oakland, California, a state whose burial customs she had satirised in her best-known book, The American Way of Death, 1963. She had left instructions for a frugal...