World renowned novelist Dora Saint, 'Miss Read', dies

Dora Saint, who used the nom de plume Miss Read (her mother’s maiden name), died peacefully at home on Saturday.
Mrs Saint, a former Chieveley resident and school teacher, was persuaded in the mid-1950s to write a novel based on her experience of village life and a village school.
Sheltered under her pen name Miss Read, she wrote her first thee novels in the first person, Village School, Village Diary and Storm in the Village. All were set in her first fictional village of ‘Fairacre’.
Her daughter, Jill Saint, who now lives in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, said: “This was a gimmick to start with but then she got fed up writing as the first person.”
She said her mother “rebelled” against this idea in the late ’50s and invented her next great fictional village ‘Thrush Green’ (based on Wood Green, Whitney).
These novels included Mrs Pringle, Friends at Thrush Green and Affairs at Thrush Green, and again were about village life.
She retired from writing at the age of 83, after penning more than 40 books, including two children’s novels. Mrs Saint’s novels were published worldwide and in 1990 she had sales of two-and-a-half million copies. She was equally popular in America where the appeal lay in the perceived Englishness of her books. Many of her novels were also translated into languages including Japanese and Russian. Her novels were re-issued in 2005, on the 50th anniversary of her first book.
In 1940 she married Douglas Saint, a former teacher and assistant headteacher at St Bartholomew’s School for almost 40-years.
Jill Saint was born a year later.
In 1960 Mrs Saint joined the court service as a magistrate in Newbury and continued there for 23 years.
In 1997, Mrs Saint was appointed a Member of the British Empire in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours for services to literature.
Ms Saint said: “She got such pleasure from the natural world and living in the country: plants, animals and birds. She moved to the country from London when she was seven and she felt she had come home, that never changed.
“This had a huge impact on her, it was very important to her and informed everything she did.”
A memorial service for Mrs Saint will be held at St Mary’s Church, Great Shefford, on Thursday, May 17 from 2.30pm.