June Guesdon Braybrooke (; 9 June 1920 – 30 May 1994), better known by her pen name Isobel English, was an English writer. Her best-known novel is Every Eye. Fellow writer Stevie Smith called her tone "a voice of our times, ironical and involved".
After secretarial college in London, she was taught literature by Kenneth Allott, while working with him. She married Ronald Dundas Orr-Ewing in 1941 and they had a daughter, Victoria, in the following year, but divorced in 1951. In 1953, she married a fellow writer, Neville Braybrooke (1923–2001).
English's many literary friends included Beryl Bainbridge, Olivia Manning and Stevie Smith, who described her tone as "very sagacious and very original – a voice of our times, ironical and involved". She died of leukaemia on 30 May 1994 and was buried in Hampstead Cemetery, London. The Independent, 7 June 1994Peter Parker, "Braybrooke , June Guesdon (1920–1994)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004) Retrieved 6 September 2016, pay-walled.
English wrote introductions for Virago Press reissues of several of Olivia Manning's books and collaborated with Braybrooke on Manning's biography.
|
|