Rosemary Timperley

Rosemary Timperley (20 March 1920 – 9 November 1988) was a British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter. She wrote a wide range of fiction, publishing 66 novels in 33 years, and several hundred short stories, but is best remembered for her ghost stories which appear in many anthologies. She also edited several volumes of ghost stories.

Her story Harry has been filmed several times.

Biography Born in Crouch End, North London on 20 March 1920 to architect George Kenyon Timperley and teacher Emily Mary (née Lethem), she went to Hornsey High School, before studying for a Bachelor of Arts degree in History at King's College London, graduating in 1941. She then taught English and History at South-East Essex County Technical School in Dagenham, Essex, and also worked at Kensington Citizens Advice Bureau during World War II. In the mid-1940s, while still working as a teacher, she started submitting short stories to magazines and newspapers, with the first, "Hot Air – and Penelope", being published in Illustrated 10 August 1946.

Still writing, she left her job as a teacher to become a staff writer for Reveille magazine in 1949, editing the personal advice column (under the pen name Jane Blythe), readers' letters and writing a number of stories, feature articles and book reviews. She married Physics teacher James McInnes Cameron in 1952, and they lived together in Essex. After writing a number of novels (starting with A Dread of Burning in 1956), she left Reveille to become a freelance writer, going on to write a number of radio and television scripts. By the early 1960s she had separated from her husband, who died in 1968, but she continued writing novels, short stories and scripts until her death on 9 November 1988.