Margaret Irwin

 Margaret Irwin was a novelist who  mainly wrote historical novels. She was born in London in  1889 and was brought  up after her parents' death by an uncle who was a teacher in Clifton, Bristol.  She had a good education for a girl and went to Oxford, which was unusual for women at the time.  She was close in age to Dorothy L Sayers who also studied at Oxford and became a novelist. 

In 1929 she married Jack Monsell who was from an Anglo Irish family and who was a children's novelist and an illustrator.. Jack produced some of the covers for her books.

She began to write in the 1920s and most of her works were historical - but she also wrote a non fictional biography of Sir Walter Raleigh.  Like Georgette Heyer (who created the genre of Regency romance) Irwin was known for researching her works and for achieving a degree of accuracy.  She mainly wrote about kings and queens, and one of her most famous novels was "Young Bess" published in 1944, about Elizabeth I.  She wrote 2 more novels about Elizabeth, "Elizabeth Captive Princess" and "Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain."  The books  are rather romantic, depicting Elizabeth in a very favourable light, as a rebellious young girl and a patriot.  The trilogy ends with her becoming queen. 

Other novels were about the Stuart dynasty and their supporters, there is a novel about the Scottish Marquis of Montrose and his romance with Louise, the daughter of the Stuart Princess Elizabeth, who became queen of Bohemia but ended up living in exile.  Irwin also wrote a romantic biographical novel on Mary Queen of Scots and her romance with Lord Bothwell. It is rather hagiographical about Mary and exaggerates her feelings for Bothwell, but it has been well liked.  

Her best work is probably the Elizabeth trilogy which has been republished in recent years.  Part of it was made into a film in the 1950s as "Young Bess" with Jean Simmons. 

Margaret died in 1967, having lost her husband some years earlier.