Rachel Ferguson

Background

Rachel Ethelreda Ferguson was born on 17 October 1892 at The Nest, Church Grove, Hampton Wick.

Education

She was educated at home and then sent to a finishing school in Florence, Italy.

Career

She wrote 13 novels, 2 autobiographies and a number of plays. She was the third child of Robert Norman Ronald Ferguson, a Treasury Clerk. By the age of 16 she was a fierce campaigner for women"s rights and considered herself a suffragette, "I was as militant as authority allowed me to be.

In 1911 she became a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began a career on the stage, which was cut short by the advent of World War 1.

Ferguson joined the Women"s Volunteer Reserve and also took to writing in earnest. She wrote for Punch, and was the drama critic for the Sunday Chronicle, writing under the name "Columbine".

In 1923 she published her first novel, False Goddesses, but it was not until 1931, when she published the absurdist novel, The Brontës Went to Woolworths, that she gained national recognition. She went on to write eleven more novels.

Ferguson died in Kensington in 1957 at the age of 65.

Two of her books currently remain in print.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Child in the Theatre
  • Royal borough,

Membership

I wanted to go to prison but was refused on the score of age." She went on to become a leading member of the Women"s Social and Political Union.