Pamela Frankau

Pamela Sydney Frankau (3 January 1908 – 8 June 1967) was a popular English novelist. Descended from an artistic and literary family, although abandoned by her novelist father, Gilbert Frankau, at an early age, she became a prolific writer in her early years. She stopped writing for a decade after the death of her lover, Humbert Wolfe, in 1940. After serving her country in World War II, she was married for several years to an American naval officer. In the late 1940s, she returned to England and resumed her writing career with even more success than before.

Early life and 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, Frankau and her elder sister, Ursula, were sent as boarders to Burgess Hill School for Girls, Sussex, until 1924. Frankau wrote about this period in her autobiographical novel I Find Four People (1935).