Helen de Guerry Simpson

Youth and education

Simpson was born in Sydney. She attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Rose Bay (now called Kincoppal-Rose Bay, School of the Sacred Heart) and Abbotsleigh, Wahroonga. On returning to England she went to Oxford, reading French (1916-1917), at a time when women could study at Oxford but not receive degrees. in April 1918, she joined the WRNS to work in decoding as a senior section officer. In September 1919 she returned to Oxford to study music, and there became intensely interested in theatre, founding the Oxford Women's Dramatic Society and writing and publishing several plays. She was sent down in 1921 without completing her degree, apparently for breaking regulations prohibiting men and women students from acting together.

Career as a writer

She was a member of the Detection Club and contributed to two of their round-robin works The Floating Admiral (1931) and Ask a Policeman (1933) and the creative non-fiction The Anatomy of Murder (1936).

Boomerang, published in 1932, was her first big success. It was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and serialised for radio by William Power in 1937.

Simpson also wrote two historical biographies, The Spanish Marriage (1933) and Henry VIII (1934), and a book of household management, The Happy Housewife (1934). The Waiting City, which appeared in 1933, is her translation of a selection from Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Le Tableau de Paris. She wrote tree novels, Enter Sir John (1929), Printer's Devil (1930) and Re-enter Sir John (1932), with Clemence Dane. Enter Sir John was filmed as Murder! (1930) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who later directed the film version of Under Capricorn (1949). Helen Simpson also wrote portions of the dialogue for Hitchcock's movie Sabotage (1936).

In 1937 Simpson went to Australia for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. She gave a series of lectures and conducted research for the novel Under Capricorn, which appeared in 1937 and was set in Sydney about 100 years earlier. In 1938, she published A Woman Among Wild Men, an account of Mary Kingsley. This was later published in 1950 as a Puffin Story Book under the title A Woman Among Savages.

Political career

In 1939 she was selected by the Isle of Wight Liberal Association to be their parliamentary candidate at the UK General Election which was expected to take place in 1939 or 1940. The seat was held by the Conservatives but the Liberals were expected to challenge strongly to recapture the seat they last won in 1923. She attended the Liberal Party Assembly at Scarborough in June 1939 and travelled around England speaking for the Liberal Party.

Personal

She became ill and underwent a surgical operation in 1940, but died from cancer on 14 October 1940. Her husband, Sir Denis Browne, survived her with their daughter Clemence, who was named after Simpson's collaborator Clemence Dane. Simpson's last novel, Maid No More, was published in 1940.