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Portrait image of P.D. James Photo: Anders Wiklund / TT

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James, P.D.

English crime writer born in Oxford as Phyllis Dorothy James. She graduated from the Cambridge High School for Girls in 1937. She served in the Red Cross during the war, and in 1941 she married Ernest Connor Bantry White. Although she dreamed of becoming a writer she helped her husband pass medical school while looking after the couple's daughters. After his return from the war, her husband...

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Literary figures

Maisie Dobbs

Gender: Female

Young, brave and intelligent private detective who started to work as a domestic when she was only 13 years old. Maisie Dobbs had a benevolent female employer, and got to study nursing and psychology. She fell in love with a doctor who was killed in the First World War, and in 1929 she started her own detective agency. Jacqueline Winspear has written more than a dozen books about her.

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