1972 Margaret Mary Julia Ashford, nicknamed by her family ‘Daisy’, was born in 1881 and brought up in Lewes, Sussex, among a prosperous and numerous Catholic family. As a nine-year-old girl she wrote novels after tea and before bedtime (a strict six o’clock) for the delectation of her father, a civil servant in the War Office. A readership of one. He copied the stories out for her, in a more legible adult hand, but retaining her turns of phrase and orthography. Given the size of the Ashford brood, Daisy clearly won more than her fair share of paternal attention.
Before she could put pen to paper she dictated to her father her first story, The Life of Father McSwiney, which she composed aged four. Daisy’s mature oeuvre includes The Hangman’s Daughter, Where Love Lies Deepest, and the novel on which her fame rests, The Young Visiters.
This last work was published in 1919 by Chatto and Windus as a curiosity, with an introduction by J.M. Barrie, who – manuscript in hand – vouched for the bona fides of the ‘nine-year-old authoress’ and that the work was ‘unaided’.
The Chatto editor in charge of the project, Frank Swinnerton (himself a novelist), interviewed the now fortyish author before giving it the go-ahead. Miss Ashford daringly asked Swinnerton for as much as £10. Chatto came through, voluntarily, with £500 and eventually paid thousands more. As the Daily Mail recorded, one half of London was laughing over The Young Visiters in 1919. The other half was impatiently waiting for the next edition to be printed, so they could get hold of the work that everyone else was in fits about.
Miss Ashford wrote nothing more after going to board at a convent school aged thirteen, in Haywards Heath. Fiction was put away with other childish things. She married a farmer, ran a hotel and had children of her own. Doubtless she told a rattling good bedtime story. Her identity as the authentic author of a work that was often considered a fake because it was so good was confirmed, at the end of a long and useful life, on 15 January 1972, in a Times obituary.
The flavour of the romance is given in the first paragraph:
Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him. He had quite a young girl staying with him of 17 named Ethel Monticue. Mr Salteena had dark short hair and mustache and wiskers which were very black and twisty. He was middle sized and he had very pale blue eyes. He had a pale brown suit but on Sundays he had a black one and he had a topper every day as he thorght it more becoming. Ethel Monticue had fair hair done on the top and blue eyes. She had a blue velvit frock which had grown rarther short in the sleeves. She had a black straw hat and kid gloves.
Ethel is also given to ‘sneery’ looks when things do not go quite her way. Happy to say, everything does go her way and all ends happily other than for Mr Salteena. But at a superannuated 42, what could the old codger expect?