Enid Bagnold

Enid Bagnold , 1889-1981, English novelist and playwright, b. Rochester, Kent, England. She was a nurse in a military hospital in World War I. In 1920 she married Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters news agency. Bagnold's works combined wit, charm, sophistication, and wisdom. Her best-known novel was National Velvet (1935), the story of a teenage girl who wins a horse in a raffle and rides it to victory in the famed Grand National race. Bagnold's other works included the novels Serena Blandish (1924) and The Loved and the Envied (1951), and the plays The Chalk Garden (1955), The Chinese Prime Minister (1964), and A Matter of Gravity (1975).

Bibliography: See her autobiography (1969); also studies by L. Friedman (1986) and A. Sebba (1987).

Bagnold, Enid [ Lady Roderick Jones] (1889–1981), English author, who was already well known as a novelist when her Serena Blandish (1924) was dramatized by S. N. Behrman and produced in New York in 1929. It was seen in London in 1938 with Vivien Leigh in the title-role. Enid Bagnold herself then dramatized two of her novels, Lottie Dundass (1943) and National Velvet (1946), but her most successful play was The Chalk Garden (NY, 1955; London, 1956). It contained two major female roles: an elderly woman ( Gladys Cooper in New York, Edith Evans in London) whose failure to control her chalk garden symbolized her failure with her daughter and granddaughter; and the companion ( Siobhán McKenna in New York, Peggy Ashcroft in London), formerly convicted for murder, who helps to solve both problems. Three later plays, The Last Joke (1960), The Chinese Prime Minister (NY, 1964; London, 1965), and Call Me Jacky (1967), were unsuccessful in spite of excellent casts. The last was produced in New York in 1976 as A Matter of Gravity, with Katharine Hepburn.

Bagnold, Enid Algerine ( Lady Jones) (1889–1981), novelist and playwright, moved in artistic and Bohemian circles, writing several novels, of which the best known was National Velvet (1935, filmed 1944 with Elizabeth Taylor as the girl who wins the Grand National). Of her plays, the most successful was The Chalk Garden (1955). Her Autobiography was published in 1969.