Hilda Stewart Reid

Hilda Stewart Reid (30 November 1898 – 24 April 1982) was an English novelist and historian. Her four novels, published between 1928 and 1939, are Phillida, Two Soldiers and a Lady, Emily, and Ashley Hamel.

Hilda Reid was the daughter of Sir Arthur Hay Stewart Reid, a judge in the Indian legal service, whose family had served in India for several generations. Sir Arthur and his father, Henry Stewart Reid of the Bengal Civil Service, were both born in India. Hilda Reid's mother, Agnes Imogen Beadon, was the sixteenth child of Sir Cecil Beadon, who was Lieutenant Governor of Bengal from 1862 to 1866. Hilda Reid was born in Lahore, then in India now in Pakistan. Her early childhood was spent in Lahore; she moved to England at the age of nine, where she was cared for by her mother's sister Irene.

Hilda Reid took her undergraduate degree at Somerville College Oxford, where she was a member of a close-knit group of friends, several of whom went on to have distinguished literary careers. The group included Winifred Holtby, Margaret Kennedy, Vera Brittain, and Sylvia Thompson. Hilda Reid remained particularly close, personally and professionally, to both Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain. In her autobiography Testament of Youth Vera Brittain describes how Winifred Holtby introduced her to "her friend Hilda Reid, the pale, whimiscal second-year student who has since become, as H.S.Reid, the author of exquisite historical novels, delicately etched with the fine pen of a literary drypoint artist". In her review of Hilda Reid's first novel in Time and Tide, Vera Brittain wrote: "To the generation that went down from Oxford just seven years ago, Miss H.S.Reid was known as an ardent and fastidious historical scholar, blissfully indifferent to the anxieties and rivalries of an examination system which offers little scope to an imagination so fine and so constructive." Brittain described Phillida in her review as "a rare and lovely book". In her review of Emily in The Schoolmistress, Winifred Holtby wrote: "Her two earlier books, Phillida and Two Soldiers and a Lady, were subtle and scholarly stories of the period after the Civil Wars. But in Emily she looks at the modern world, which is giving so much trouble to statesmen at Geneva. She looks and she laughs".

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