Background
Katharine Briggs was born in Hampstead, London, the eldest of three surviving daughters of Ernest Edward Briggs, who came from Yorkshire (his family had had great success in coal mining in Halifax and Wakefield), and Mary Cooper.
Katharine Briggs was born in Hampstead, London, the eldest of three surviving daughters of Ernest Edward Briggs, who came from Yorkshire (his family had had great success in coal mining in Halifax and Wakefield), and Mary Cooper.
Lady Margaret Hall.
The other two sisters were named Winifred and Elspeth. The family moved to Perthshire in 1911, where Ernest built a house, Dalbeathie House. Ernest died there two years later in 1913.
Katharine began attending Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1918, obtained a Bachelor in 1922, and took her Master of Arts in 1926.
Returning home (because of the family coal legacy, and a colliery in Normantown, she did not need to seek work), she began writing and running plays – the entire family enjoyed theatrical productions, and it was a lifelong interest of Katharine"s – while she studied folklore and 17th-century English history. She gained her Doctor of Philosophy with a thesis on Folklore in seventeenth-century literature (Folklore in Jacobean Literature) after the Second World War.
During the war, she had been busy teaching in a Polish refuge school and working for the medical branch of the WAAF. Briggs went on to become known as a folklorist. After her first book on British fairies, The Personnel of Fairyland, she went on to write many other books on fairies and folklore, including The Anatomy of Puck and its sequel, Pale Hecate"s Team (1962), An Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976), as well as a number of children"s books such as The Legend of Maiden-Hair (her first published book) or Hobberdy Dick, and Kate Crackernuts.
A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language: Participant A: Folk Narratives (1970) was re-published in three volumes in 2011 as Folk Tales of Britain, and is described by Phillip Pullman in its introduction as the fullest and the most authoritative collection of British folktales that exists.
She lived the latter part of her life at Barn House in Burford, Briggs died aged 82 on 15 October 1980.