Whipples novels

Dorothy Whipple was born in Lancashire in 1893, to an architecht and his wife. She set most of her novels in the North, and among the professional and business classes. She was a young woman at the outbreak of the First World war and became a secretary to Henry Whipple, who was an educational administrator and many years her senior. She married him and began to write novels. She also wrote short stories and children's books. Her works are very northern in feeling, with a sympathy for the poor and servants, and the women are strong and warm hearted characters. In High Wages, she writes about a girl who starts off working in a shop, and ends having her own business, partly because of help from another older woman, whose husband had gone up in the world and made a lot of money. She shows sympathy to people who have risen out of their class and feel uncomfortable trying to mix with richer, more upper class people. Her first novel, Young Anne, is autobiographical. Anne lives with her parents and 2 older brothers in a mill town, and although she is the cleverest of the 3 children she has to wait for the War to give her a chance to get a job. Her father and mother have never been affectionate to her, and she depends on Emily, the family maid/housekeeper for help and friendship. Her father is a very strict, religous man, and Anne who is imaginative and dreamy, often gets into trouble, but when she has just left school, he becomes ill and dies suddenly, leaving his family with very little money. Anne is taken in by her great Aunt who is also religious and strict and gives her a hard time. She manages to escape to a secretarial job, when the war makes it acceptable for girls of good family to work to help the war effort.