June Guesdon Braybrooke better known by her pen name Isobel English, was an English writer.

Life

Born in London to the Welsh civil servant John Mayne Jolliffe (1885–1957) and his Tasmanian wife May Guesdon (1885–1966), June had to go to Brittany when she was two for a salt-water cure for tuberculosis of the spine. Upon her return she was sent in 1928 to La Retraite, a convent school in Burnham-on-Sea

Burnham-on-Sea

Burnham-on-Sea is a town in Somerset, England, at the mouth of the River Parrett and Bridgwater Bay. Burnham was a small village until the late 18th century, when it began to grow because of its popularity as a seaside resort. It forms part of the parish of Burnham-on-Sea and Highbridge...

, Somerset, which she described in her 1956 novel Every Eye. After secretarial college in London she was taught literature by Kenneth Allott

Kenneth Allott

Kenneth Allott was an Anglo-Irish poet and academic, and authority on Matthew Arnold.-Life:Born in Glamorgan, where his father, a doctor, was serving as a locum, Allott later experienced the break-up of his parents' marriage, followed by the death of his mother...

 while working with him. She married Ronald Dundas Orr-Ewing in 1941 and they had a daughter, Victoria, in the following year, but they were divorced in 1951. In 1953, she married a fellow writer, Neville Braybrooke (1923–2001). Her many literary friends included Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge

Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, DBE was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker...

, Olivia Manning

Olivia Manning

Olivia Mary Manning CBE was a British novelist, poet, writer and reviewer. Her fiction and non-fiction, frequently detailing journeys and personal odysseys, were principally set in England, Ireland, Europe and the Middle East. She often wrote from her personal experience, though her books also...

, and Stevie Smith

Stevie Smith

Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith was an English poet and novelist.-Life:Stevie Smith, born Florence Margaret Smith in Kingston upon Hull, was the second daughter of Ethel and Charles Smith. Contemporary Women Poets...

, who described her tone as "very sagacious and very original - a voice of our times, ironical and involved." She died of leukaemia and was buried in Hampstead Cemetery

Hampstead Cemetery

Hampstead Cemetery is a historic cemetery in West Hampstead, London, located at the upper extremity of the NW6 district. Despite the name, the cemetery is three-quarters of a mile from Hampstead Village, and bears a different postcode...

, Fortune Green

Fortune Green

Fortune Green was originally part of the district of Hampstead but became physically separated from it by the building of the new turnpike road in the 1830s....

, London.

Writings

Isobel English published her first book, The Key that Rusts, a year after she was married (having described her occupation as 'writer' on her marriage certificate). Every Eye followed two years later, and in 1961 her final novel Four Voices. She published numerous short stories and a collection them, Life after All appeared in 1973, winning the Katherine Mansfield Prize. A single unproduced play, Meeting Point, was published in The New Review. She wrote introductions to Virago

Virago Press

Virago is a British publishing company founded in 1973 by Carmen Callil to publish books by women writers. Both new works and reissued books by neglected authors have featured on the imprint's list....

reissues of several of Olivia Manning's books.