Pamela Frankau Biography

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British novelist, born in London. After refusing the offer of a place at Cambridge, she devoted herself to writing. Her first published novel, The Marriage of Harlequin (1927), appeared when she was 19 and was followed by over thirty others, including She and I (1930); Tassell-Gentle (1934), about a man losing his memory in an air crash; The Devil We Know (1939), which explores her feelings about her own Jewish ancestry in the character of Philip Meyer, an ambitious young screenwriter in the developing British film industry of the 1930s. This prolific period was interrupted by the war and by the death, in 1940, of her lover, Humbert Woolfe. Shaken in the Wind (1948) deals with her conversion to Catholicism. The Willow Cabin (1949), her most successful book, describes the relationship between Caroline Seward, a young actress, her lover, Michael Knowle, a man almost twice her age, and his wife, Mercedes, a Roman Catholic. The novel moves between London in the 1930s and during the Blitz to post-war America, incorporating the author's wartime experiences. Other novels include The Winged Horse (1953), a novel about a newspaper tycoon; A Wreath for the Enemy (1954), set in the South of France, which describes the relationship between the bohemian Wells family and the bourgeois Bradleys; and The Bridge (1957), which displays, in its treatment of the bisexuality of its central character, the author's uncompromising honesty. Her autobiography, I Find Four People, was published in 1935.