Winifred Ashton CBE, better known by the pseudonym Clemence Dane (21 February 1888 – 28 March 1965), was an English novelist and playwright.

[1] In 1919 she wrote Legend, the story of a group of acquaintances who debate the meaning of a dead friend's life and work.

Dane's 1921 play, A Bill of Divorcement, tells the story of a daughter who cares for her deranged father and faces the fact that his mental illness may be hereditary.

The pinnacle of Dane's success was winning an Academy Award with Anthony Pelissier for the film Perfect Strangers, released in the United States as Vacation from Marriage, starring Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr as a married couple transformed by their experiences in the Second World War.

She compared the modern girl's choices with the popular gambling card game Speculation in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

[5] Dane's 1931 novel Broome Stages followed the fortunes of an acting family from the time of Queen Anne to the present.

Dane's The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939) is a dystopian novel set in a politically unstable near future.

[8] Years after Dane expressed an interest in returning to acting, and her friend Noël Coward wrote the part of Madame Arcati, the eccentric medium in Blithe Spirit for her.

This was a series of science fiction novels featuring such authors as John Wyndham, Robert Sheckley, and Cyril M.