AustLit

'Nancen Beryl Masterman was born in 1900, in Middlesex in the south of England and grew up as an Edwardian child acquiring the language, idiom and accent of her parents’ social class. She had a twin Jan and four other siblings. Her mother, Lilla, (from a successful London Osmond family) and father, Charles, told them stories and read from the rich tradition that English literature provided. Her father had attended the great English public school, Charterhouse, to which he had sent his eldest son, Kay, and her mother had been to a school run by one of the early suffragists, Francis Buss, who was a leader in the development of girls’ education at the end of the nineteenth century.' (Author's introduction)