Enid Bagnold

Enid Algerine Bagnold, Lady Jones, CBE (27 October 1889 – 31 March 1981) was a British writer and playwright best known for the 1935 story National Velvet.

She attended art school in London, and then worked as assistant editor on one of the magazines run by Frank Harris, who became her lover.

During the First World War she became a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse;[5] she wrote critically of the hospital administration, which won her fame, and was dismissed as a result.

They lived at North End House, Rottingdean, near Brighton (previously the home of Sir Edward Burne-Jones), enjoying a glamorous social life.

[12] Her biography, by Anna Sebba and published in 1987, revealed some of the more problematic and contradictory aspects of her life: literary feuds, her marriage, her approach to motherhood, pre-war Nazi sympathies, her morphine addiction, and her contempt of the many leading actors who appeared in her plays.

Bagnold's biographer Anne Sebba says that "although always described as a novel, the serious effort to discover the motivations of a mother and the instincts of children leads The Squire close to the realms of documentary."

Enid Bagnold Age c. 25 by Maurice Asselin
Part of the former home of Enid Bagnold in Rottingdean