Elizabeth Berridge

Elizabeth Berridge was born and educated in London and Geneva. In 1940 she married Reginald Moore, founder and editor of "Modern Reading" and other wartime literary magazines.

When she and her family returned from living in Wales she worked as editor for Peter Owen and as a journalist, reviewing for the BBC and various magazines, broadcasting talks and stories.

In 1965 she began a 25 year stint as regular fiction reviewer for the Daily Telegraph while contributing stories to Country Life, New Writing, Punch, Time and Tide, Cornhill and a number of other literary collections and magazines both here and abroad.

Her nine novels were published at infrequent intervals, and were well-received in this country and the States. ACROSS THE COMMON, published in 1964, won the Yorkshire Post Best Novel of the Year Award. Her most recent novel, TOUCH AND GO, published in 1995, was adapted as a Radio 4 Saturday afternoon play and Diana Athill said on reading it: "Now here is a true novelist".

Rachel Simhon wrote about these short stories in her review that: 'Written between 1943 and 1947, they strip the period of its cinematic cliches... In this slim volume Berridge covers such universal subjects as widowhood, loneliness, a woman's struggle to reconcile the need of her husband with those of her child..."

All the stories are written in a spare, direct style reminiscent of another Elizabeth - Elizabeth Taylor, to whom Berridge bears many similarities.