G. B. Stern (Gladys Bertha Stern) Biography

British novelist, born in London, educated at schools in London, Germany, and Switzerland. Her first novel, Pantomime (1914), was followed by over forty others. The best-known of these are the series based on her own family, of which the first three volumes were published as The Rakonitz Chronicles. These include Tents of Israel (1924; later published as The Matriarch), A Deputy Was King (1926), Mosaic (1930), Shining and Free (1935), and The Young Matriarch (1942). They chronicle the fortunes of a wealthy, cosmopolitan Jewish family and are set against the background of fashionable 1930s' London. Her literary circle during this period included Noël Coward, Rebecca West, and Somerset Maugham. She also wrote short stories, plays, and biographies of Jane Austen and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as an autobiography, All in Good Time (1954), which describes her conversion to Catholicism.