Angela Thirkell

Angela Margaret Thirkell (; , 30 January 1890 – 29 January 1961) was an English and Australian novelist. She also published one novel, ''Trooper to Southern Cross'', under the pseudonym Leslie Parker.

Early life

She was the elder daughter of John William Mackail (1859–1945), a Scottish classical scholar and civil servant from the Isle of Bute who was the Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1906 to 1911. Her mother was Margaret Burne-Jones, daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, and through her, Thirkell was the first cousin once removed of Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. Her brother, Denis Mackail (1892–1971), was also a novelist and they had a younger sister, Clare. The three Mackail children were, in their youth, treated first-hand to the fairytales of Mary de Morgan.

Angela Mackail was educated in London at Claude Montefiore's Froebel Institute, then at St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, and in Paris at a finishing school for young ladies.

Marriages and children

Soon after her return from Paris, Angela Mackail met James Campbell McInnes (1874–1945), a professional singer, and married him in 1911. Their first son was born in January 1912 and named Graham after McInnes's former lover, Graham Peel. He became a diplomat and writer. Their second son was the novelist Colin MacInnes. A third child, Mary, was born and died in 1917, and Angela then divorced her husband for adultery, in a blaze of publicity.

In December 1918, Angela married George Lancelot Allnut Thirkell (1890–c. 1940), an engineer of her own age originally from Tasmania, and in 1920 they sailed for Australia together with her sons. However, the Thirkells led a 'middle-middle-class life' in Melbourne, which to Angela was all deeply unfamiliar and repugnant. Their son Lancelot George Thirkell, later Comptroller of the BBC
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