Enid Bagnold

Who was Enid Bagnold?

Enid Algerine Bagnold, Lady Jones, CBE, known by her maiden name as Enid Bagnold, was a British author and playwright, best known for the 1935 story National Velvet which was filmed in 1944 with Elizabeth Taylor.

She was born in Rochester, Kent, daughter of Colonel Arthur Henry Bagnold and his wife Ethel Alger, and brought up mostly in Jamaica. She went to art school at the school of Walter Sickert in London, and then worked for Frank Harris, who was also her first lover.

She was a nurse during World War I, writing critically of the hospital administration and being dismissed as a result. She was a driver in France for the remainder of the war years. She wrote of her hospital experiences in A Diary Without Dates and her driving experiences in The Happy Foreigner.

Her brother Ralph Bagnold founded the Long Range Desert Group during World War II, a precursor of the SAS.

In 1920, she married Sir Roderick Jones but continued to use her maiden name for her writing. They lived at North End House in Rottingdean, near Brighton, Sussex, the garden of which inspired her play The Chalk Garden. They had four children. Their great-granddaughter is Samantha Cameron, wife of the United Kingdom's current Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader David Cameron.

Famous Quotes:

• It's not till sex has died out between a man and a woman that they can really love. And now I mean affection. Now I mean to be fond of (as one is fond of oneself) --to hope, to be disappointed, to live inside the other heart. When I look back on the pain of sex, the love like a wild fox so ready to bite, the antagonism that sits like a twin beside love, and contrast it with affection, so deeply unrepeatable, of two people who have lived a life together (and of whom one must die) it's the affection I find richer. It's that I would have again. Not all those doubtful rainbow colors.
• The pleasure of one's effect on other people still exists in age -- what's called making a hit. But the hit is much rarer and made of different stuff.
• If a dog doesn't put you first where are you both? In what relation? A dog needs God. It lives by your glances, your wishes. It even shares your humor. This happens about the fifth year. If it doesn't happen you are only keeping an animal.
• Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.
• When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.
• The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.
• A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.
• Judges don't age. Time decorates them.
• Sex -- the great inequality, the great miscalculator, the great Irritator.
• As for death one gets used to it, even if it's only other people's death you get used to.