Enid Bagnold Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Early Life
Enid Algerine Bagnold was born on 27 October 1889 in England and grew up in a family shaped by imperial service and travel. Her father, Colonel Arthur Henry Bagnold of the Royal Engineers, was frequently posted overseas, and the family spent part of Enid's childhood in Jamaica before returning to Britain. The mobility of her early years, combined with a disciplined household and a mother attentive to culture and reading, gave her both a cosmopolitan outlook and an early sense of independence. From adolescence she nurtured ambitions in the arts, gravitating toward writing and drawing. By the time she settled in London as a young woman, she had resolved to make literature her field, observing with a keen eye the subtleties of class, gender, and performance in the social worlds around her.

War Service and First Books
The First World War was the crucible of Bagnold's early authorship. She served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, where the realities of wartime medicine and the institutional culture of a great hospital left a profound impression on her. Those experiences became A Diary Without Dates (1917), a candid, unsentimental account that challenged hospital hierarchies and sentimentality alike. The book's frankness cost her her nursing post, but it made her name as a writer with a distinct, incisive voice. Seeking to remain useful to the war effort, she then became an ambulance driver in France. From that service came The Happy Foreigner (1920), a novel that transformed the immediacy of wartime driving and the disorientations of language and landscape into a quietly modern exploration of freedom, peril, and love.

Marriage, Family, and Literary Breakthrough
In 1920 Bagnold married Sir Roderick Jones, the influential chairman of Reuters. The marriage brought her into close contact with a cosmopolitan circle of journalists, artists, and public figures. It also gave her material security and a base in Sussex at North End House, Rottingdean, where she balanced family life with sustained literary work. The most decisive success of this period was National Velvet (1935), the novel of a determined village girl who, with a former jockey's help, trains a remarkable horse for the Grand National. The book captured the hunger for self-transcendence in youth and the intimate knowledge of horses and countryside that Bagnold had absorbed. Its 1944 film adaptation, featuring Elizabeth Taylor, propelled the story into international popular culture and cemented Bagnold's reputation as a writer who could unite psychological acuity with narrative sweep.

Novels of Maturity
Bagnold did not confine herself to tales of youth. The Squire (1938) is a landmark novel about pregnancy, childbirth, and the ambivalence and exultation of maternal power, written with a candor rare in its time. The Loved and Envied (1951) turns to age, beauty, and the currencies of admiration, anatomizing how glamour and authority ebb and persist. Across these works she demonstrated a humane, unsparing attention to bodily experience and social performance, bringing subjects commonly sidelined in mid-century fiction to the center of serious art.

Plays and Later Career
In the 1950s Bagnold turned decisively to the stage. The Chalk Garden (1955), set in a Sussex house and garden troubled by secrets, pits a worldly, enigmatic governess against a grand but unsettled household. The play's elegance of dialogue and moral intrigue drew critical praise in London and New York and was later adapted for the cinema. She continued to write for the stage in subsequent years, including A Matter of Gravity, further refining a theatrical style that placed exacting speech and layered character at the fore. Bagnold's theatrical work confirmed her as a dramatist equally at home with wit, psychological tension, and the choreography of social space.

People Around Her
Family ties threaded through Bagnold's career and identity. Her husband, Sir Roderick Jones, provided both companionship and a vantage on the news world at a time when global communications were rapidly changing. Her brother, Ralph Alger Bagnold, became renowned as a desert explorer and soldier, later founding the Long Range Desert Group in the Second World War and contributing significantly to the science of sand and dunes; his adventurous career echoed the family's outward-looking ethos. In the realm of adaptation and fame, Elizabeth Taylor's embodiment of Velvet Brown on screen became inseparable from public memory of Bagnold's most famous creation.

Themes and Style
Bagnold's writing is marked by clarity of observation, a refusal of sentimentality, and an interest in thresholds: youth to adulthood, pregnancy to motherhood, safety to peril, silence to speech. Horses and landscape are never mere scenery; they are forces that test and transform her characters. Her prose can be poised and ceremonial, then suddenly intimate, while her dialogue on stage carries the pulse of contest and revelation. She wrote about class without caricature and about female experience without apology, helping to widen the territory of subjects considered fit for serious fiction and drama.

Final Years and Legacy
Bagnold continued to publish and to reflect on her career in later life, returning in essays and autobiographical writing to the questions that animated her work: how people invent themselves, how they endure, and where truth hides in decorum. She died in 1981 in England, having spanned nearly a century of change in British life and letters. Today she is remembered above all for National Velvet and The Chalk Garden, but her earlier wartime books and her later novels reveal the full range of a writer who brought boldness and precision to themes too often sentimentalized or ignored. Her life connected the wards of a London hospital, the roads of wartime France, the study of a news magnate, and the stages of the West End and Broadway. In that crossing of worlds lay her distinctive authority: a capacity to see clearly, to speak plainly, and to dramatize the restless energies of desire, courage, and grace.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by Enid, under the main topics: Art - Mortality - Aging - Dog - Doctor.