Winifred Peck novelist

Winifred Peck was born in 1882 to a clerical family. There was a Bishop in the family and they were well educated. She was also well educated, and went to a good girls' school which was unusual at the time. She then went on to Oxford, although women there could study for degrees they were not allowed to actually have a degree until the early 1920s. She made the best of her opportunities, and her first book was a historical biography of Louis IX of France. Some years later she started to write novels. She wrote some detective stories and was very popular. She married a civil servant, James Peck, who had a job in food control during the war. One of her novels published in 1940 was called Bewildering Cares, set in the early months of the war. It is in diary form, about a clergyman's wife in a provincial town, and her struggles to do her duty as "Mrs Vicar". Her son is in the army, and her husband is something of a scholar, so he sometimes finds it hard to understand and mix with ordinary working people. It is a bit limited as a novel because it is set before the Blitz which involved everyone in the war, and united the British people.. It has no plot as such. The heroine keeps busy, manages with only one servant and visits the poor and tries to soothe over quarrels among the church ladies. The parish has a crisis when the curate Mr Strang preaches a sermon on pacificism, which does not go down well but finally, they all make peace. The novel ends with Dick, her son, coming home on leave, prior to being sent abroad, and telling his mother that he is getting married.