Dorothy Whipple

Dorothy Whipple, author of eight novels and numerous short stories published by Persephone Books

Born in 1893, Dorothy Whipple (née Stirrup) had an intensely happy childhood in Blackburn as part of the large family of a local architect. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first week of the war, for three years she worked as secretary to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a widower twenty-four years her senior and whom she married in 1917. Their life was mostly spent in Nottingham; here she wrote Young Anne (1927), the first of eight extremely successful novels which include High Wages (1930), Greenbanks (1932), The Priory (1939) and Because of the Lockwoods (1949). Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr Knight (1934) and They Were Sisters (1943), were made into films. She also wrote short stories (including The Closed Door and Other Stories and Every Good Deed and Other Stories) and two volumes of memoirs: The Other Day (1936) and Random Commentary (1965). Her final novel was Someone at a Distance (1953). Returning in her last years to Blackburn, Dorothy Whipple died there in 1966.