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Dorothy Whipple
Dorothy Whipple
Born	26 February 1893; Blackburn, Lancashire, England
Died	14 September 1966 (aged 73); Blackburn, England
Pen name	Dorothy Whipple
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	English
Period	20th century
Genre	Popular fiction
Website
	persephonebooks.co.uk/pages/dorothy-whipple

Dorothy Whipple (née Stirrup) (26 February 1893 – 14 September 1966) was an English writer of popular fiction and children's books.^[1] Her work gained popularity between the world wars and again in the 2000s.

Personal life

Dorothy Stirrup was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, and had a happy childhood as one of several children of Walter Stirrup (a local architect) and his wife Ada Cunliffe. Her close friend George Owen was killed in the first week of the First World War. She worked for three years as a secretary to Henry Whipple, a widowed educational administrator 24 years her senior, and married him in 1917. Their life together was mostly spent in Nottingham. She returned to Blackburn after his death in 1958 and died there in 1966.^[2]^[3]

Overview

Described as the "Jane Austen of the 20th Century" by J. B. Priestley,^[4] her work enjoyed a period of great popularity between the wars, two of her novels being made into feature films, They Were Sisters^[5] (1945) and They Knew Mr. Knight^[6] (1946).

While the popularity of Whipple's work declined in the 1950s, it revived in the 2000s, when six novels were republished by Persephone Books. A volume of her collected short stories appeared in October 2007.^[7] Five of these were broadcast as The Afternoon Reading on BBC Radio 4. By April 2019, ten of the 132 books published by Persephone Books were written by Whipple.^[8]

Bibliography

Young Anne (1927), republished 2018
High Wages (1930), republished 2009
Greenbanks (1932), republished 2011
They Knew Mr. Knight (1934), republished 2000
On Approval, (1935)
The Other Day: An Autobiography (1936), republished 2022
The Priory (1939), republished 2003
After Tea, and Other Stories (1942)
They Were Sisters (1943), republished 2005
Every Good Deed (1946), republished 2016
Because of the Lockwoods (1949), republished 2014
Someone at a Distance (1953), republished 1999
Wednesday and Other Stories (1961)
Tale of Very Little Tortoise (1962)
The Smallest Tortoise of All (1964)
Little Hedgehog (1965)
Random Commentary: Books And Journals Kept from 1925 Onwards (1966), republished 2020
Mrs. Puss and That Kitten (1967)
The Closed Door and Other Stories (2007)

References

^ "Dorothy Whipple Biography". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 17 April 2019.
^ Persephone Books' author introduction Retrieved 17 May 2018. Archived 17 May 2019 at the Wayback Machine
^ "Local novelist was described as the 'Jane Austen of the 20th century'". Nottingham Post. Archived from the original on 16 December 2014. Retrieved 11 December 2014.
^ Cottontown Website entry on Dorothy Whipple "Dorothy Whipple". Archived from the original on 3 March 2009. Retrieved 24 October 2007.
^ bkoganbing (20 September 1946). "They Were Sisters (1945)". IMDb.
^ malcolmgsw (4 March 1946). "They Knew Mr. Knight (1946)". IMDb.
^ "Books published by Persephone Books". Archived from the original on 17 May 2019. Retrieved 9 April 2015.
^ Lyall, Sarah (April 14, 2019). "A Bookstore of One's Own". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved April 17, 2019.