Janet Hitchman

Janet Hitchman (5 July 1916 – 19 May 1980) was a British writer.

Life Hitchman was born Elsie May Fields to Margaret Ames, a seamstress. On her birth certificate, her father's name was left blank. When she located her birth certificate as an adult, she found penciled on the back "Frederick Burrows, deceased 27.9.1916." Throughout her childhood she was known as Elsie Burrows. Hitchman's mother was a widow, her father a young soldier who was killed less than three months after her birth. Her mother gave the child to an elderly couple Elsie knew only as Gran and Granfer Sparkes and died less than two years later. While growing up, Hitchman contracted mastoiditis. In The American Scholar, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun described it as "unsound, unfair and distressing".

Hitchman was working on a life of the author, Ouida, when she diagnosed with an inoperable cancer in 1978. In her last 18 months, she recorded a series of interviews for BBC producer Hallam Tennyson in which she talked about her coming death. The resulting piece, "The Fact of Death," was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 1980.

Books