Ursula Bloom (1892–1984)

Ursula Bloom was born in Chelmsford, Essex, the daughter of Rev. James Harvey Bloom, a Church of England clergyman, and his wife Mary (Polly) Gardner. She spent her early childhood in Whitchurch, Warwickshire. She began writing as a child, and read all the works of Charles Dickens before she was 10 years old. Her mother eventually left her father, taking Ursula and her brother to live in St. Albans. For two years, Ursula earned a living playing the piano in a cinema in nearby Harpenden. In 1916, she married Captain Arthur Denham-Cookes, with whom she had a son. Her husband died in 1918 during the worldwide influenza pandemic. In 1925, she remarried to Charles Gower Robinson of the Royal Navy. Ursula became a journalist and a prolific fiction and nonfiction writer. She worked as the chief crime reporter for the Sunday Dispatch and Empire News, and was the beauty editor for Woman's Own. She published more than 500 works in her career. Many of them were novels written under various pseudonyms, including Lozania Prole, Sheila Burns, Mary Essex, Rachel Harvey, Deborah Mann, and Sara Sloane. Under her birth name, she published a biography of her father, Parson Extraordinary (1963) and a biography of her great-grandmother Frances Graver, The Rose of Norfolk (1964). Ursula also wrote about her journalism experiences in The Mightier Sword (1966) and wrote Rosemary for Stratford-upon-Avon (1966) during the years she lived there. She was named a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.