Jill Paton Walsh
Gillian Honorine Mary Bliss was born on 29 April 1937 to John Bliss, an engineer for the BBC who at his death had 363 patents to his name, and Patricia Paula DuBern, a homemaker. She went with her mother and siblings to live with grandparents in St. Ives, Cornwall, when she was three years old because of the World War II bombings. In 1944, after the grandmother had died, Bliss returned to London to live with her mother and her younger siblings, who had returned to London earlier. Bliss was educated at St. Michael's Convent, North Finchley, London. She attended St. Anne's College, Oxford, graduating in 1959, and lived in Cambridge. After graduating, Bliss taught English at Enfield County Grammar School for Girls, but left her position in 1962, as she was expecting her first child. The year before, in 1961, she had married Antony Edmund Paton Walsh; they settled in Richmond, south-west London, and had one son and two daughters. In the early 1970s, Jill met John Rowe Townsend and they began an affair. She left her first husband only in 1986, when their youngest daughter turned 18. Antony did not want a divorce because of his Roman Catholic faith. Jill and Townsend were married only in 2004, after Antony's death on December 30, 2003. Townsend died in 2014. In February 2020, she met Nicholas Herbert, 3rd Baron Hemingford, and they married in September of that year. She died a month later, in October, of kidney and heart failure in the hospital of Huntingdon, Cambridge. She is survived by her third husband, as well as her brother Christopher Bliss, her children Edmund Paton Walsh, Margaret Paton Walsh, and Clare Murphy, and her three grandchildren. In 1996, Paton Walsh received the CBE for services to literature and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1998, she won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association, recognising "A Chance Child" as the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award. In an essay on realism in children's literature, Paton Walsh stated that realism (like fantasy) is also metaphorical, and that she would like the relationship between the reader and her characters Bill and Julie to be as metaphorical as that between "dragons and the reader's greed or courage". "Knowledge of Angels" (1993), a medieval philosophical novel, shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. Other adult novels include: Paton Walsh wrote four detective stories that featured part-time college nurse Imogen Quy, and were set in the fictional St. Agatha's College, University of Cambridge: In 1998, she completed Dorothy L. Sayers's unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane novel, "Thrones, Dominations". In 2002, she followed this up with another Lord Peter novel, "A Presumption of Death". In 2010, she published a third, "The Attenbury Emeralds". Her latest addition to the series, "The Late Scholar", was published 5 December 2013 in the UK, and 14 January 2014 in North America.
Personal life
Gillian Honorine Mary Herbert, Baroness Hemingford, (née Bliss; 29 April 1937 – 18 October 2020), known professionally as Jill Paton Walsh, was an English novelist and children's writer.