Clemence Dane, pseudonym of Winifred Ashton Biography

British playwright and novelist, born in Blackheath, London. She studied art at the Slade School of Art and in Dresden, later becoming an actress. She achieved recognition with her first novels, Regiment of Women (1917) and Legend (1919), before turning to drama. Her later novels include Broome Stages (1931), a romantic presentation of theartical life which establishes analogues between a family of actors and the Plantagenets. The first and most enduring of her many plays, A Bill of Divorcement (1921), concerns a woman who divorces on the grounds of her husband's insanity so that she can remarry. Other plays include Will Shakespeare (1921), Granite (1926), Wild Decembers (1933), about the Brontës, and a dramatized version of Max Beerbohm's The Happy Hypocrite. In many of her works she was preoccupied by a romantic sense of England. Her pseudonym is derived from the church of St Clements Dane, London.