Enid Bagnold was an English novelist and playwright who was known for her broad range of subject and style. She is best known for the 1935 story National Velvet, which was made into a film in 1944 starring Elizabeth Taylor. Enid was born in Rochester, Kent but spent most of her childhood in Jamaica. She lived in London as a young woman where she attended Art school. During the First World War she became a VAD nurse and went on to become a driver in France.
Enid married Sir Roderick Jones, but continued to use her maiden name for her writing. Virginia Woolf remarked caustically that Enid was ‘a scallywag who married a very rich man’. They lived at North End House, Rottingdean, near Brighton, (previously the home of Sir Edward Burne-Jones) enjoying a glamorous social life. Enid and her husband had four children.
Enid’s posthumous biography of 1987 revealed what a rebellious, counterculture life she had led, with literary feuds, an addiction to morphine, pre-war Nazi sympathies and her intense dislike of many actors who graced her plays. Enid died in 1981.
Enid served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse at the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich (left)
