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| 17 North Road, Grassendale |
Dorothy Kathleen Broster was born on the 2nd of September 1877, to the ship owning family of Thomas Mawdsley Broster and Emilie Kathleen Gething at Devon Lodge (now Monksferry House), 17 North Road, Grassendale Park, Garston, Liverpool on the banks of the River Mersey, possibly the reason for her life long interest in the sea. She was clearly most intelligent and parental resources allowed her the best education available. This meant a girls' school in Liverpool where she was privately educated until, at the age of 16, the family moved to Cheltenham where she attended The Cheltenham Ladies College, and then in 1896 St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she read Modern History from 1896 to 1900. She was the eldest of four siblings, and two younger sisters later followed her at Cheltenham. She was among the first women students at Oxford and completed her degree studies in 1898, but had to wait for her degree award and MA until 1920 when graduation was first extended to women, as at the time women were not awarded degrees. For thirteen years she served as secretary to the Regius Professor of History, Charles Harding Firth and collaborated on several of his works. Her first two novels, 'Chantemerle: A Romance of the Vendean War' (1911) and 'The Vision Splendid' (1913), were co-written with a college friend, Gertrude Winifred Taylor: During WW1 she served as a Red Cross nurse with a voluntary Franco-American hospital, but returned to England with a knee infection in 1916. After the war, she and a friend, Gertrude Schlich, moved near to Battle, East Sussex where she worked full-time as a writer.
Between 1911 and 1947 she produced 15 popular historical novels. An intensely private person, she wrote always under the name D K Broster and on her death in 1950 critics were surprised to find that she was neither male nor Scottish, as had often been assumed. Research has only reinforced this impression of someone who guarded her privacy as we know next to nothing of her early life, and very little was written about her during her lifetime. She is best known for her compelling chronicle of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 in 'The Flight of the Heron' (1925), 'The Gleam in the North' (1927), and 'The Dark Mile' (1929), which were collected as The Jacobite Trilogy in 1984. These books are highly regarded for the historical accuracy with which they present the Highland communities of the eighteenth century. Indeed she was a pioneer of the form, a serious historian whose fiction was founded in solid research; yet only her old college, St Hilda's, holds reprint copies of the trilogy. Many will remember the Trilogy as romantic historical novels first published in the 1920s and still in print until a year or so ago - but her other historical fiction is long out of print and unknown to a modern reader, though those who were teenagers in the 1930s and 1940s may well have wept over 'The Yellow Poppy' or laughed their way through 'Almond Wild Almond'
she also wrote several short horror stories, collected in 'A Fire of Driftwood' and 'Couching at the Door'. The title story of 'Couching at the Door' involves an artist haunted by a mysterious entity. Other supernatural tales include 'Clairvoyance', (1932) about a psychic girl, 'Juggernaut' (1935) about a haunted chair, and 'The Pestering', (1932) focusing on a couple tormented by supernatural entity.
Trying to establish much about Dorothy's life is difficult because of her reclusive habits. She never married and lived with her friend Gertrude Schlich at Broomhill in Farthings Lane, Catsfield. This lane is about as distant from disturbance as one can find: a single-track cul-desac through farmland, pointing towards Battle Abbey, and probably not even part-paved during her lifetime. Broomhill is close to its western end, a large detached property with extensive gardens and a good view over the unspoilt landscape towards Battle. The pair make an occasional appearance in the Hastings Observer through their making small gifts, for example to the Buchanan Hospital. It is likely that they had met at Oxford, sharing the same kinds of work and together developed the interest in the Jacobites that informs Dorothy's major works. In 1953 Schlich gave to the British Museum their collection of original documents bought from its first collector. Dorothy seems not to have kept in touch with her family, her father Thomas died in 1899 but her mother Emily lived to 1938.
Dorothy died in Bexhill Hospital on the 7th February 1950, aged 73 but of the family, only a nephew attended the funeral. It seems that no photograph of her was ever published, nor were there any memoirs, and so understandably no biography has yet been published. Her obituary in The Times describes her style of writing: 'Miss Broster wrote in a tried and rewarding vein. The romantic bias of her imagination was, as a rule, unconcealed, but on the other hand she almost always showed firm restraint in her handling of the essential historical facts; the history in her novels, in brief, was usually sound. To this virtue she added a genuine story-telling gift, good craftsmanship and a flow of graceful sentiment. Her earlier work lacked something of spirit and much of it kept rather too close to the cloak and dagger convention to attain any real individual quality; while some of the later books, perhaps, tended to be a little mechanical in style. But at her best she was an accomplished, lively and picturesque storyteller who provided graceful reading.'
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