Kathleen Farrell was born in London in 1912 and educated at a convent school. Her first book, Johnny's Not Home from the Fair (1942), was written while working for the wartime secretary-general of the Labour party, after which she founded a prestigious literary agency, eventually sold to a rival firm. Farrell lived in Hampstead for twenty years with her partner Kay Dick, reviewer, editor and author of They (1977), in a literary circle including Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith and Olivia Manning. She wrote five more novels - Mistletoe Malice (1951), Take It to Heart (1953), The Cost of Living (1956), The Common Touch (1958), and Limitations of Love (1962) - as well as contributing much-admired stories to Macmillan's Winter's Tales series. Farrell's fiction was critically acclaimed for its savage wit and unsentimental humour, compared to Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen, but failed to find a popular audience, and - by the time of her death in Hove in 1999 - she had fallen into obscurity.