Lovelybooks

Patience Dunn was born in 1922, the youngest of 4 children. As a child she suffered two bouts of prolonged illness and it was during the recuperative periods that her 'nanny' read many of the classic books to her, including Dickens. She had a wonderful imagination and a very retentive memory. She had some belated schooling at Miss Fauncey's Academy. Here there was great emphasis on literature - Greek drama and Shakespeare were high on the agenda together with dance and drama which she loved. She was loaned a bible that had alternate French and English pages. From struggling with this new puzzle she learned a considerable number of French words but lacked the confidence to attempt speaking French. At the beginning of the 1939 - 1945 war she worked in the Women's Land Army tending a herd of Jersey dairy cows. She loved the cows but this period of bucolic bliss probably only lasted for a year or two because she was asked to go to London to do different war work. This work involved tracing a pencil-drawn technical drawing to produce a perfect ink replica. This could then be converted into a blueprint. She was proud to have done drawings for parts of the Hawker Hurricane and Tempest. The war work wound down as peace approached and she then worked on the drawings for the new road signs. She remembered doing the Level Crossing Without Gates sign and also the Torch of Knowledge school sign. Towards the end of the war she married Michael Dunn and they settled in Pyrford in Surrey. As their two children grew up and she found she had time on her hands, she started to write short stories, firstly for women's magazines and then, as she honed her skills, she became a regular contributor to a London evening paper extending her oeuvre from romance to crime. She was always extraordinarily good at the Times crossword filling in all the quotation clues immediately... Her stories were handwritten into A4 size hard-backed books. When completed and corrected, she would type the manuscript on her small portable typewriter, using carbon paper, to produce an original plus a copy. Her first full length novel was 'Return to Parady', for which she won Romantic Novelists' Association's Elinor Glyn Award for 1962. She followed this with Gathering Moss which won her The Association's President's Prize for 1964. The Vane followed in 1966, and The Coming of Angel in 1972. The first three were published with Ward Lock whilst the fourth was with Robert Hale. When her husband retired in 1974 they moved to Devon. They both liked to travel and now they had the time, thus writing seems to have been put aside for a while. She wrote Glengarrion in the late 1980s but has stayed dormant till now. Patience Dunn died in 2003.