Cecil Woodham-Smith (1896–1977)

Cecil Blanche FitzGerald was born in Tenby, Wales, to a prominent Irish family. She graduated from Oxford University in 1917, and went to work as a typist and copywriter for an advertising firm in London. In 1928, she married George Woodham-Smith, a solicitor, with whom she had two children. She began her literary career in her forties with some potboiler novels published under the pseudonym Janet Gordon, such as April Sky (1938). She then moved on to serious works of history and biography. She produced four critically-acclaimed and popular books, each dealing with a different aspect of the Victorian era: Florence Nightingale, 1820–1910 (1950), The Reason Why (1953), The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 (1962), and Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times (1972). In 1960, she was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 1969 she received the A.C. Benson Medal for her contributions to British literature.