British Author. Born at 22 Perham Road, West Kensington in London, the only child of the classics master at St. Paul's School, her real name was Eirene Adeline Botting, but she never liked it and seldom used it, although both her real name and her pen-name appear on her tombstone (her mother's name, before her marriage, had been Christine White.) In 1906, her parents converted to Catholicism, and she was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton. At the age of sixteen, however, she was "asked to leave" when the nuns discovered that she had been writing a "scandalous" novel. She then took various jobs as a governess, clerk, and actress, whilst writing advertisements and short stories for newspapers. In 1921, she married Reginald Green-Wilkinson; but, the folowing year, the union was dissolved on the grounds of non-consummation. The failure of her marriage resulted in her spending nine months in the Bethlehem Mental Hospital, where she was force-fed and suffered hallucinations. In 1925, she married Eric Earnshaw Smith, but this, too, failed; it is thought that both her first husbands were homosexual. She then abandoned religion. In 1929, she had a daughter, Susan Chitty, with a mining engineer named Rudolph Glossop, whom she was expected to marry. To everyone's surprise, in November 1930, she married Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Picture Post magazine. They had a daughter, Lyndall, but were divorced in 1938. During the War, she worked for the Special Operations Executive and resumed her Catholicism. Her first novel, "Frost in May" had been published in 1933 and was a huge success, although its sequels ("The Lost Traveller," "The Sugar House," "Beyond the Glass Sky") were less well-regarded and sold poorly. She died of cancer at St. Raphael's Nursing House in Danehill in Sussex. The year after her death, her trilogy was televised by the B.B.C. Both of her daughters have written books about her.