Ruby M. Ayres

She died on 14 November 1955 at home in Weybridge, Surrey, aged 74, of a combination of pneumonia and a cerebral thrombosis.

(which sold over 50,000 copies in the first three years),[2] she moved publishing houses to Hodder and Stoughton, where she remained until her death in 1955.

[4] Wodehouse intentionally chose the name "Rosie M. Banks" to be similar to hers, stating in a 1955 letter to his biographer Richard Usborne that he "wanted a name that would give a Ruby M. Ayres suggestion".

[7] In the late 1930s, she was targeted in a prospective study by W. H. Auden - alongside such figures as John Buchan and Henry Williamson - as representative of the proto-Fascist in English writing,[8] perhaps because of her glorification of the wartime soldier-hero.

[9] During the late 1930s, she wrote an advice column in the Oracle, complimented as "extremely sensible" by George Orwell in an essay on the media consumption of the working class.