Rachel Ferguson
| Rachel Ferguson | |
|---|---|
| Born | Rachel Ethelreda Ferguson 17 October 1892 The Nest, Church Grove, Hampton Wick, England |
| Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Kensington, England |
| Occupation | Journalist, Author |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts |
Rachel Ferguson, (1892–1957) was an English novelist, playwright and journalist. She wrote 13 novels, 2 autobiographies and a number of plays.
Contents
Life
Rachel Ethelreda Ferguson was born on 17 October 1892 at The Nest, Church Grove, Hampton Wick. She was the third child of Robert Norman Ronald Ferguson, a Treasury Clerk. She was educated at home and then sent to a finishing school in Florence, Italy. By the age of 16 she was a fierce campaigner for women's rights and considered herself a suffragette, "I was as militant as authority allowed me to be. I wanted to go to prison but was refused on the score of age."[1] She went on to become a leading member of the Women's Social and Political Union.
In 1911 she became a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began a career on the stage, which was cut short by the advent of World War 1. Ferguson joined the Women's Volunteer Reserve and also took to writing in earnest. She wrote for Punch, and was the drama critic for the Sunday Chronicle, writing under the name 'Columbine'.[2] In 1923 she published her first novel, False Goddesses, but it was not until 1931, when she published the absurdist novel, The Brontës Went to Woolworths, that she gained national recognition. She went on to write eleven more novels.
Ferguson died in Kensington in 1957 at the age of 65. Two of her books currently remain in print.
Works
Novels and short story collections
- False Goddesses (1923)
- The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1931) (Reprinted as a Virago Press in 1988 and as part of the Bloomsbury Group in 2009)
- Victorian Bouquets: Lady X Looks On (1931)
- The Stag at Bay (1932)
- Nymphs and Satires: Humorous Sketches (1932)
- Celebrated Sequels (1934)
- A House in Lowndes Square (1936)
- Alas, Poor Lady (1937) (Reprinted by Persephone Books in 2006)
- A Footman for the Peacock (1940)
- Evenfield (1942)
- A Stroll Before Sunset (1946)
- The Royal Borough (1950)
- Sea Front (1954)
Memoirs and biographies
- Passionate Kensington (1939)
- Memoirs of a Fir Tree: The Life of Elsa Tannenbaum (1946)
- We Were Amused: Memoirs (1958)
Plays
- Charlotte Brontë: A Play in Three Acts (1933)
- The Late Widow Twankey (1943)
- And Then He Danced the Ife of Espionosa by Himself (1946)
References
- Oxford DNB
- Author's Page Persephone Books
- Alas, Poor Lady at Persephone Books
