Памела Фрэнкау: Жизнь и творчество английской писательницы.

English novelist

other people with the same surname
Pamela Sydney Frankau (3 January 1908 – 8 June 1967) was a popular English novelist from a prominent artistic and literary family. She was abandoned by her novelist father Gilbert Frankau at an early age, and she became a prolific writer. She stopped writing for a decade after the death of her lover, the poet Humbert Wolfe, in 1940. After serving in World War II, she was married for several years to an American naval officer, but returned to England and resumed her writing career.

Frankau was born in London, the younger daughter of Dorothea Frances Markham Drummond Black and the novelist Gilbert Frankau. Her grandmother was the satirist Julia Frankau, one of several famous siblings, and her uncle was the British radio comedian Ronald Frankau. Never attentive to his two daughters, her father abandoned the family for another woman in 1919, and Frankau and her elder sister Ursula were sent as boarders to Burgess Hill Girls (previously named Burgess Hill School for Girls) in Sussex until 1924. Frankau wrote about this period in her autobiographical novel I Find Four People (1935). She had success as a writer from a young age. Marriage of Harlequin (1927), her first novel, was written at age 19 and well received by critics. Over the next dozen years, she published 20 novels. She had a long but stormy friendship with the author and journalist Dame Rebecca West. A long relationship with the married poet Humbert Wolfe ended with his death in 1940. Frankau then ceased to write for almost 10 years. During the Second World War, she worked for the BBC] the Ministry of Food and then with the Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she began a lesbian affair with fellow officer Marjorie Vernon Whitefoord, who sponsored Frankau's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1942. She wrote of her distant relationship with her father in Pen to Paper (1961). In 1962, Frankau was diagnosed with breast cancer with a poor prognosis due to the remedial cancer treatments available at the time. After a five year battle with the disease, Frankau died aged 59 at the Hampstead, London home she had shared with Margaret Webster. She was buried in a Catholic service in Hampstead Cemetery. Margaret Webster dedicated her first autobiography, titled "The Same, Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family" (1969), to Frankau's memory. Colonel Blessington, Frankau's final novel, was edited by her cousin and writer Diana Raymond, and it posthumously was published in 1968.