I.A.R. Wylie

I. A. R. Wylie
I. A. R. Wylie in Germany, c. 1910
Born	Ida Alexa Ross Wylie (1885-03-16)16 March 1885 Melbourne, Australia
Died	4 November 1959(1959-11-04) (aged 74) Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Other names	Ida Alena Ross Wylie
Occupation	Writer, poet

Ida Alexa Ross Wylie (16 March 1885 – 4 November 1959), known by her pen name I. A. R. Wylie, was an Australian-British-American novelist, screenwriter, short story writer, and poet who was honored by the journalistic and literary establishments of her time, and was known around the world. Between 1915 and 1953, more than thirty of her novels and stories were adapted into films, including Keeper of the Flame (1942), which was directed by George Cukor and starred Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Wylie was born Ida Alexa Ross Wylie on 16 March 1885 in Melbourne, Australia to Alexander Coghill Wylie from England and Ida Ross, a farmer's daughter from Australia. I. A. R. Wylie's father, Alec Wylie of England, was in debt much of his life and often on the move from creditors. And so it was that sometime in the 1880s he fled England for Australia, but not before divorcing his first wife while proposing to her sister, Christine (who refused). In Australia, he soon married a plain farmer's daughter named Ida Ross. The couple's first child, I. A. R. Wylie, was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1885, literally named after her parents: Ida Ross and Alec Wylie. In 1888, Alec moved back to London with his new wife and young child, but Ida Ross died shortly thereafter. Alec then renewed relations with Christine, his first wife's sister, and Christine became the young Wylie's home school teacher and guardian, raising her while her father struggled from one crisis to the next. "Christine was just the first of a line of women who proved far stronger and more reliable than any man in Ida's life."

After spending three years in finishing school in Belgium, Wylie first studied in England, and later in Germany, where she also taught and began writing. Wylie's self-education at home meant she spent many hours making up her own stories to fill up time, and, at the age of 19, she sold her first short story to a magazine. For example, Wylie had a roommate named Esme who had been raised in India and so she wrote stories based on Esme's reminisces. Wylie went on to write at least five books based in India, The Native Born, or, The Rajah's People (1910); The Daughter of Brahma (1913); Tristram Sahib (1915); The Temple of Dawn (1915); and The Hermit Doctor of Gaya (1916). While living in Germany in the early 1910s, she wrote a number of books including My German Year (1910); Rambles in the Black Forest (1911); The Germans (1911); and Eight Years in Germany (1914). Her novel, Towards Morning (1918), was "perhaps the first in English to suggest that not all Germans were evil imperialists."