The English Air

Dorothy Emily Stevenson was a best-selling Scottish writer. She published more than 40 "light romantic novels" over a span of more than 40 years. D. E. Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1892; she was the daughter of one of the ‘lighthouse’ Stevensons (Robert Louis was her father’s first cousin) and lived in Scotland all her life. She did not go to school but was educated by a governess, starting to write stories when she was eight. Holidays were spent at North Berwick, where she was a keen golfer. In 1916 she married Major James Peploe (a nephew of the artist Samuel Peploe). After the First World War they lived in Bearsden near Glasgow and brought up two sons and a daughter. Dorothy wrote her first book in 1923 but her second did not appear for nine years. In 1934 she published Miss Buncle’s Book. Thereafter she wrote a novel a year, selling over four million copies of her books in Britain and three million in the USA. Among them were Miss Buncle Married in 1936 and The Two Mrs Abbotts in 1943. During the war the Peploes moved to Moffat; D.E. Stevenson died there in 1973.