Eustace Tennyson D'Eyncourt Jesse (1853–1928), vicar of St Peter Kirkley, and his wife Edith Louisa James (1866–1941).

[4] Her older sister, Stella Mary Jesse (1887–1942), was an actress, and married in 1929 Eric Andrew Simson, who wrote under the name Laurence Kirk.

[10] The family had an interlude in South Africa, sailing there at the end of 1891, and staying in Cape Town and Grahamstown, as Eustace Jesse sought a clerical appointment.

[4] Jesse reported on the German attacks on Belgium in the First World War for Collier's Weekly, in November 1914,.

She was in a group of American journalists: E. Alexander Powell, Joseph Medill Patterson and the photographer Donald C. Thompson, and witnessed the siege of Antwerp.

[16] Frederick W. Hilles who met Jesse at dinner in 1930 described her in his diary as "blonde with a hard face & a tremendous sense of her importance in things intellectual.

[18][19] She died at home of a heart attack on 6 August 1958 at 11 Melina Place, St John's Wood, London.

Also Comments on Cain (1948), on the trials of Harold Wolcott, Reginald Ivor Hinks and the serial killer Eugen Weidmann[29] Her novels include A Pin to See the Peepshow (London, W. Heinemann Ltd, 1934; Virago Modern Classics; British Library Women Writers), a fictional treatment of the case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters.

[11] The marriage was kept secret until 1922;[71] a guest of Arnold Bennett for dinner at the Savoy Hotel on New Year's Eve 1920, she went as Miss Tennyson Jesse.