[1] Three of her books were commended runners up for the annual British Carnegie Medal, one collection of her fairy tales and two historical novels.
[2][a] Picard was born in Richmond-upon-Thames, a borough of London, and lived for some time in a rented cottage outside Seaford, East Sussex, with her mother.
During the Second World War she was a volunteer fire-watcher, spending her time at night on top of the library roof writing literary fairy tales for her own amusement.
Readings were broadcast on British Radio Children's Hour in 1947[1] and fifty original fairy tales were eventually published, primarily by Oxford University Press beginning in 1949.
Picard did so, beginning with The Odyssey of Homer in 1952; later she heard that it was appreciated by the famous interpreter of Greek myths, Robert Graves.
It features a 10-year-old girl, a knight's daughter, who hears of her father's death in Scotland and leaves her Sussex home to find the truth behind his disappearance.
Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges, Ransom for a Knight was popular with girl readers who related to the spirited female heroine of the story.
[2][a] Encyclopædia Britannica names Picard one of ten foremost members of a "new English school" of children's historical fiction, "stressing conscientious scholarship, realism, honesty, social awareness, and general disdain for mere swash and buckle, [which] produced work that completely eclipsed the rusty tradition of Marryat and George Alfred Henty.