E. Arnot Robertson

Eileen Arbuthnot Robertson (10 January 1903 at Moor Lodge, South Holmwood, Surrey, baptised 18 March 1903 at St Mary's Church, Holmwood – 21 September 1961 in Hampstead, London) was an English novelist, critic and broadcaster.

Robertson was the daughter of Dr George Arbuthnot Robertson (1860–1942), physician and surgeon, and his wife Elsie Margaret (née Brune). She had one sister, Mary Arbuthnot born 1899. Robertson was educated at Sherborne School for Girls, which she strongly disliked. The family moved to London in 1917. She later described the atmosphere in the family as "stultifying". She continued her education for two years in France and Switzerland.

Robertson took her first job, on the London-based magazine Answers, at the age of 19. In that year she also sat anonymously for the painting A Red Haired Girl by James McBey. On 26 February 1927 she was married in Kensington to H. E. (from 1951 Sir Henry) Turner (1891-1961), secretary-general of the Empire Press Union, later the Commonwealth Press Union. They adopted a son, Gordon Turner, in the late 1930s. The Turners moved to Heath Street, Hampstead, in 1946. They were passionate sailors, as the sailing background of Ordinary Families shows. Turner's death in a boating accident precipitated Robertson's suicide five months later.

By her mid-twenties E. Arnot Robertson, as she chose to be called in print, was on her way to becoming a popular "middlebrow" novelist with a large following, especially for her first five novels.

Four Frightened People (1931), set in a Malaya that she never actually visited, became Volume 15 on the Penguin list in 1935. A film, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, was released in 1934. Equally celebrated was Ordinary Families (1933), the story of a young girl growing up with her family in Pin Mill, Suffolk. Both titles were repeatedly reprinted into the 1980s in the Virago paperback series, as was her first novel, Cullum, in 1989.

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