Enid Bagnold

British novelist, playwright, poet, and journalist.

• Born: October 27, 1889
• Birthplace: Rochester, Kent, England
• Died: March 31, 1981
• Place of death: St. John’s Wood, London, England

Biography

Enid Algerine Bagnold was born on October 27, 1889, in Rochester, England. Her father was Arthur Henry Bagnold, a colonel in the Royal Engineers, and her mother was Ethel Alger Bagnold. The family moved frequently, and Enid and her younger brother Ralph spent their early years in Jamaica. After the family returned to England, she studied at Priors Field, an exclusive boarding school for girls, and then attended schools in Paris, Switzerland, and Germany. In 1908, she enrolled in Walter Sicket’s School of Art in London.

From the age of nine she knew she wanted to be a writer, and in 1912 she moved to London to work as a journalist for Hearth and Home magazine and then for Modern Society. After nine months, she returned to her parents’ home and began a novel that was never completed, and remained with them until she married. During World War I, she served for two years with the Voluntary Aid Detachments in a British hospital, and then served as a driver for the French army. Her first book, Diary without Dates (1918), described these experiences.

That year she also published a book of poems, The Sailing Ships, and Other Poems. Bagnold’s first novel, The Happy Foreigner (1920), was published under the pseudonym A Lady of Quality. That same year, she married Sir Roderick Jones, the head of the Reuters News Agency, and became Lady Jones. The couple had four children, Laurian, Timothy, Richard, and Dominick, two of whom became writers. The family had homes in Sussex and in London, where Bagnold enjoyed gardening, cooking, horseback riding, and sewing, in addition to strictly setting aside three hours a day for writing. Less satisfying to her were her duties as the wife of a wealthy and important man.

Bagnold’s second novel, Serena Blandish; Or, The Difficulty of Getting Married (1924), was adapted for the stage and became a Broadway hit in 1928; she began writing her own plays in the 1940s. The strongest of her ten plays was The Chalk Garden (1956), about a governess and a problem child. It opened on Broadway the night before her sixty-sixth birthday.

Bagnold also achieved success as a children’s writer, particularly with National Velvet (1935), illustrated by her daughter Laurian Jones. The novel, about a fourteen-year-old girl and her beloved horse, was an immediate best-seller. In 1962, Bagnold’s husband died after a long illness. She continued writing plays into the 1970s, and published an autobiography in 1969. She died on March 31, 1981, in St. John’s Wood, London.

Bagnold is best known for National Velvet, which is considered one of the classics of children’s literature and has been filmed several times, most famously with a young Elizabeth Taylor. Adult audiences know her for The Chalk Garden, which was made into a film starring Deborah Kerr and Hayley Mills. The Chalk Garden was given the Award of Merit for Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1970, she was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and she was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1976.

Author Works

Drama:

The Chalk Garden, pr. 1951, pb. 1956

Serena Blandish; Or, The Difficulty of Getting Married, pr. 1928

Lottie Dundass, pr. 1943

National Velvet, pr. 1946

Poor Judas, pr. and pb. 1951

Gertie, pr. 1952

The Last Joke, pr. 1960, pb. 1970

The Chinese Prime Minister, pr., pb. 1964

Call Me Jacky, pr. 1968 (revised as Matter of Gravity, pr. 1975)

Long Fiction:

The Happy Foreigner, 1920

Serena Blandish; Or, The Difficulty of Getting Married, 1924

The Squire, 1937

The Door of Life, 1938

The Loved and Envied, 1951

Children’s and Young Adult Literature:

Alice and Thomas and Jane, 1930

National Velvet, 1935

Nonfiction:

Diary without Dates, 1918

Enid Bagnold’s Autobiography, 1970

Letters to Frank Harris & Other Friends, 1980 (R. P. Lister, editor)

Poetry:

The Sailing Ships, and Other Poems, 1918

Translation:

Alexander of Asia by Princess Marthe Bibesco, 1935

Bibliography

Deen, Stella. “Enid Bagnold’s The Happy Foreigner: The Wider World beyond Love.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, vol. 44, no. 2, 2001, pp. 131–147. Discusses Bagnold’s first novel as a record of what World War I was like in France.

Kolba, Ellen D. “Recommended: Enid Bagnold.” The English Journal, vol. 72, no. 6, 1983, pp. 76–77, doi:10.2307/816242. Accessed 20 June 2017. Discusses the novels National Velvet and The Squire.

Matlack, Cynthia S. “Metaphor and Dramatic Structure in The Chalk Garden.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 59, no. 3, 1973, p. 304+. Communication & Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=9376336&site=eds-live. Accessed 20 June 2017. Discusses the use of metaphor in the dramatic structure of The Chalk Garden.

Sebba, Anne. Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986. Authorized full-length biography of Bagnold.

Smith, Angela K. “Outsider Positions: Negotiating Gender, Nationality and Memory in the War Writing of Enid Bagnold.”Women’s Writing, vol. 24, no. 1, 2017, pp. 8–22, doi: 10.1080/09699082. Accessed 20 June 2017. Discusses Diary without Dates and The Happy Foreigner.