Elizabeth Coxhead

Elizabeth Coxhead was born in 1909, the daughter of the headmaster of Hinckley Grammar School in Leicestershire. She gained a place at Oxford (Somerville) and a first class degree (in French), rare achievements for a woman in the early 1930s. Her career was divided between writing novels and biography and working as a journalist, and her first job after university was on The Lady magazine, sharing an office with a fellow writer, Stella Gibbons.

Stella had just written a wonderfully funny 'gothic' novel, then titled 'Curse God Farm'. Elizabeth realised that the book would prove a classic, but suggested that she had a better title. Hinckley Grammar School owned a nearby farm, called 'Cold Comfort Farm', and Stella leapt at the change of name - the book, under its new title, became a classic, and the term went into the language.

Elizabeth herself wrote two pre-war novels, but her main period of success was in the 1950s, when she acquired a reputation as a literary and narrative novelist. While commuting from Buckinghamshire to Fleet Street and looking after a frail mother, she penned in her inimitable (unreadable) hand-writing a series of successful novels. 'One Green Bottle' was widely acclaimed and went into several editions both sides of the Atlantic: twice Elizabeth sold film options, but filming in the mountains proved a challenge too far in that time of huge and heavy cameras.

Later in the decade a novel about children and social work, 'The Friend in Need', was filmed successfully under the title of 'A Cry from the Streets', with - somewhat surprisingly, but successfully - the singer/comedian Max Bygraves in the leading role, alongside a host of well-known British character actors.

In the 1960s, Elizabeth became interested in the Irish Renaissance, and wrote a well-received life of Lady Gregory, one of the founders of Dublin's Abbey Theatre. Other biographies and a portrait of her own garden, 'One Woman's Garden', followed, and Elizabeth, by then no longer a staff journalist, continued to contribute to magazines, including regular articles for the Royal Horticultural Society's 'The Garden'.

She died in 1979, and in 2009, her centenary year, a blue plaque in her honour was erected at Hinckley Grammar School, a tribute to one of the town's best known daughters. Elizabeth is well remembered by loyal readers - original copies of her novels are sought after - and other of her books will shortly be available as eBooks.