Enid Bagnold

Short Biography

ENID BAGNOLD (1889-1981)(married name Jones)Novelist, memoirist, and playwright whose first published work, A Diary Without Dates (1917), was an instant success but got her fired from her job in a wartime London hospital for being a bit too honest about her experiences there. Her first novel, The Happy Foreigner (1920), deals enthusiastically and in modernist style with Bagnold's experiences as an ambulance driver in France during the war, and was praised by the likes of Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West. Her second novel, Serena Blandish, or, The Difficulty of Getting Married (1924), a sort of modernist experiment of rather tedious or outright offensive Roaring Twenties-type scandalousness, was—understandably—published pseudonymously (as a line from my favorite movie The Awful Truth goes, "It was probably easier for her to change her name than for her entire family to change theirs"). A proper children's book, Alice and Thomas and Jane, appeared in 1930, followed by her most famous novel, National Velvet (1935), which, though marketed to children for decades, was never intended by Bagnold to be a children's book. The Squire (1938) deals in unprecedentedly frank and unsentimental ways with childbirth, labor, br**stfeeding, and a 44-year-old mother's feelings about her fifth pregnancy and the four children she already has—as well as the very mixed and fascinating feelings of the women around her. It’s a lovely novel, controversial in its time but now widely appreciated, thanks to reprinting by Virago in the 1980s and by Persephone in 2013. Bagnold's final novel, The Loved and Envied, didn't appear until 1951, and its tale of an aging beauty was reportedly based on the life of Lady Diana Cooper. By this time, Bagnold was an established playwright, and she focused primarily on plays for the rest of her career. In 1969, her Autobiography appeared and received considerable acclaim.