Nancy Spain was a journalist, broadcaster, media personality and socialite in England, from the 1940s until her death in a plane crash at the age of 47. Her varied work included interviews, book reviewing and features for various publications but especially the Express.

She also published a number of books, including a series of satirical crime novels, several memoirs, children's books, two biographies (one of her ancestor Mrs Beeton) and a cookery book. Virago Modern Classics has recently republished 4 of her series crime novels featuring Natasha Nevkorina and Miriam Birdseye, two women who repeatedly find themselves investigating murder in various settings. Two of her memoirs have also come back into print courtesy of Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

She lived with her female partner, Joan 'Jonny' Werner Laurie, also a woman of letters from a publishing dynasty and a journalist, who founded the women's magazine She. They were fairly widely known to be and accepted as a lesbian couple, without it generally being said, and brought up two sons together in a manner common among upper middle class people who were more interested in life outside than domesticity. The children were packed off to various boarding schools and sent on holiday with servants to take care of them.
Nancy Spain also preferred trousers, but also, mostly wore clothes still considered in her times to be mens' attire. She does not seem to have felt there was any contradiction between living her life as she wanted to and her upbringing in a conservative middle class family in Newcastle. She was a lifelong Tory voter like her father and many (not all) of her friends and the newspaper she worked for. Collis reflects that if she had not died in 1964, she might not have been particularly comfortable with the different values of the 1960s, that she was quite happy just living life her own way in the apparently much more conservative 1950s.

I found this very thoroughly researched biography an interesting read into a character whose books are enjoying a revival of interest. It was published back in 1997 and is sadly long out of print but I was able to borrow a copy from a library's reserve stock. ( )