Ursula Torday

Ursula Torday (; 19 February 1912 in London, England – 6 March 1997), was a British writer of some 60 gothic, romance and mystery novels from 1935 to 1982. She also used the pseudonyms of Paula Allardyce , Charity Blackstock, Lee Blackstock, and Charlotte Keppel. In 1961, her novel Witches' Sabbath won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association

Early life and education Ursula Joyce Torday was born on 19 February 1912 (in some sources wrongly 1888) in London, England, United Kingdom; her mother, Caira Rose Macdonell, was Scottish, and her father, Emil Torday (1875–1931) was a Hungarian anthropologist - they had married on 17 March 1910.

She studied at Kensington High School in London before going to Oxford University, where she obtained a BA in English at Lady Margaret Hall College; she later achieved a Social Science Certificate at London School of Economics.

Career First jobs In the 1930s, she published her first three novels under her real name: Ursula Torday.

During World War II, she worked as a probation officer for the Citizen's Advice Bureau. During the next seven years she also ran a refugee scheme for Jewish children, an inspiration for several of her future novels such as The Briar Patch (a.k.a. Young Lucifer); The Children (a.k.a. Wednesday's Children) is her memoir about her work with children of the Holocaust. She worked as a typist at the National Central Library (England and Wales) in London,