Dorothy Whipple


Dorothy Whipple was an English writer of popular fiction and children's books. Her work gained popularity between the world wars and again in the 2000s.

Personal life

Dorothy Stirrup had a happy childhood as one of several children in the family of a local architect in Blackburn, Lancashire. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first week of the war, she worked for three years as the secretary to Henry Whipple, a widowed educational administrator 24 years her senior. She married him in 1917. Their life together was mostly spent in Nottingham. She returned to Blackburn after his death in 1958 and died there in 1966.

Overview

Described as by the "Jane Austen of the 20th Century" by J. B. Priestley, her work enjoyed a period of great popularity between the wars, two of her novels being made into feature films, They Were Sisters and They Knew Mr. Knight.
While the popularity of Whipple's work declined in the 1950s, it revived in the 2000s, when six novels were republished by Persephone Books. A volume of her collected short stories appeared in October 2007. Five of these were broadcast as The Afternoon Reading on BBC Radio 4. By April 2019, ten of the 132 books published by Persephone Books were authored by Whipple.