Janice Elliott (1931–1995)

Janice Elliott was born in Derby, England, to Douglas John Elliott, a commercial artist and advertising executive, and his wife Dorothy Wilson, and grew up in Nottingham. She attended Nottingham High School for Girls and then read English at Oxford University, graduating in 1953 with honors.

She worked as a journalist from 1952 to 1962, writing for publications such as House & Garden, House Beautiful, and
The Sunday Times, before becoming a full-time author, although she continued to write freelance reviews. In 1959, she married Robert Cooper, an oil executive and trans-Atlantic sailor, with whom she had a son. Her debut novel Cave with Echoes was published in 1962 and won praise from both critics and the public. She became a prolific author over the next three decades, producing 22 novels, five children's books, and a collection of short stories containing elements of what she called the bizarre and darkly magical, as well as social realism, such as The Somnabulists (1964), Secret Places (1981), The Country of Her Dreams (1982), The Italian Lesson (1985), and Figures in the Sand (1994).

The novels The King Awakes (1987) and The Empty Throne (1988) illustrated by Grahame Baker, form an Arthurian sequence for older children also known as The Sword and the Dream series. Her 1967
novel The Buttercup Chain was adapted into a film with the same title in 1970, and Secret Places, set in the Midlands in World War II, was made into a film in 1984. She was elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 1989.