Carola Oman

Carola Oman CBE (11 May 1897 – 11 June 1978) was an English historical novelist, biographer and children's writer. She was best known for her retelling of the Robin Hood legend and for a 1946 biography of Admiral Lord Nelson.

Background Carola Mary Anima Oman was born on 11 May 1897 in Oxford, the second of three children of the military historian Sir Charles Oman (1860–1946) of All Souls and his wife Mary (1866–1950), daughter of General Robert Maclagan of the Royal Engineers. She described her upbringing in her final book, illustrated with photographs: An Oxford Childhood.

As a child, Oman wrote several plays that were performed by friends. Another early interest was photography. She was sent in 1906 to Miss Batty's, later Wychwood School in Oxford. She would have liked to have gone to boarding school, but her parents would not agree, and she continued at Miss Batty's until the spring of 1914.

The family moved in 1908 into Frewin Hall, now part of Brasenose College, Oxford. Her brother Charles (C. C. Oman) became a keeper of the Victoria and Albert Museum and wrote several books on silverware and other domestic metalwork. The set designer Julia Trevelyan Oman (1930–2003) was her niece.

Oman worked as a VAD in England and then in France in 1918–1919: soon after her 1919 discharge, she met Gerald Foy Ray Lenanton (1896–1952), a soldier returning from France who would later join his family business as a timber broker. After marrying Lenanton on 26 April 1922, Oman became Lady Lenanton when her husband was knighted in 1946 for his World War II service as director of home timber production. The couple, who remained childless, lived from 1928 at Bride Hall, a Jacobean mansion in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire. In 1965, Oman produced Ayot Rectory – A Family Memoir, about the Sneade family, who had lived in the village from 1780 to 1858. Oman was quoted as speaking warmly of fellow villager George Bernard Shaw, who had been the Lenantons' first caller at Bride Hall in 1928.

The novelist Georgette Heyer was a lifelong friend, who compiled a 16-page index for Oman's Britain against Napoleon, published in 1942 by Faber. Another writer friend in Oxford was Joanna Cannan, who dedicated her 1931 novel High Table to Oman.

In her writing career of over half a century, Oman produced over 30 books of fiction, history and biography for adults and children. Her first publication, a book of verse entitled The Menin Road and Other Poems (1919), drew on her war work as a probationary VAD nurse in Oxford, Dorset, London and France in 1918–1919. She was included in the 1931 edition of The Bookman Treasury of Living Poets, edited by Arthur St. John Adcock. However, Oman largely abandoned poetry for the genre of historical fiction; her 1924 debut novel The Road Royal focused on Mary Queen of Scots. It was followed by Princess Amelia (1924), King Heart (on James IV of Scotland/ 1926), Crouchback (on the Wars of the Roses/ 1929), Major Grant (Colquhoun Grant/ 1931), The Empress (on Empress Matilda/ 1932), The Best of His Family (on Shakespeare, 1933), and Over the Water (on Bonnie Prince Charlie/ 1935). Oman also had two novels published under the pseudonym C. Lenanton, though her identity was an open secret: Miss Barrett's Elopement (1929) focusing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fair Stood the Wind (1930), an early venture of hers into the genre of contemporary fiction. which remained continuously in print for at least 40 years. Oman also wrote two more contemporary novels for adults – her last: Nothing to Report (1941) and Somewhere in England (1943).

Oman's 1946 biography of Horatio Nelson drew on material unavailable to Alfred Thayer Mahan, author of the previously definitive biography of Nelson, published in 1897. Oman had access to the papers of Lady Nelson assembled by the founder of the Nelson Museum, Monmouth. Following that, she was asked in 1954 to lecture on Moore to the Anglo-American Conference of Historians at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Her later biographical output covered David Garrick (1958), Mary of Modena (1962) and Sir Walter Scott: The Wizard of the North (1973). The warm reviews of the last include one by the English poet Elizabeth Jennings in The Catholic Herald. According to an obituary, "She did not so much popularise history as elevate the level of popular history."

Honours Carola Oman was appointed a trustee of the National Maritime Museum and later of the National Portrait Gallery. She was appointed a CBE in 1957.