Bagnold, Enid

Related Category: English Literature, 20th cent. to the Present: Biographies

(băg´nəld), 1889–1981, English novelist and playwright, b. Rochester, Kent, England. She was a nurse in a military hospital in World War I. In 1920 she married Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters news agency. Bagnold's works combined wit, charm, sophistication, and wisdom. Her best-known novel was National Velvet (1935), the story of a teenage girl who wins a horse in a raffle and rides it to victory in the famed Grand National race. Bagnold's other works included the novels Serena Blandish (1924) and The Loved and the Envied (1951), and the plays The Chalk Garden (1955), The Chinese Prime Minister (1964), and A Matter of Gravity (1975).

See her autobiography (1969); also studies by L. Friedman (1986) and A. Sebba (1987).