Dorothy Whipple (née Stirrup) (26 February 1893 – 14 September 1966) was an English writer of popular fiction and children's books. 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.Persephone Books' author introduction Retrieved 17 May 2018.
Overview Described as the "Jane Austen of the 20th Century" by J. B. Priestley,Cottontown Website entry on Dorothy Whipple her work enjoyed a period of great popularity between the wars, two of her novels being made into feature films, They Were Sisters (1945) and They Knew Mr. Knight (1946).
Her novels were inspired by the places and people around her. Young Anne (1927), High Wages (1930), Greenbanks (1932), and Because of the Lockwoods (1949) are all set in fictional or real northern industrial towns in Lancashire. Her characters experience the cobbled streets, the town centre of small shops and businesses, and the class-differentiated housing that would have been familiar to residents of such places in the interwar years.
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. 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.
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
External links
Persephone Books website for Dorothy Whipple Oxford Dictionary for National Biography entry for Dorothy Whipple Blackburn Museum website entry for Dorothy Whipple