return to home  
Join   |  Gift   |  Member Login   |  Library Login
BookBrowse Mobile
Follow Us: 
   P.D. James: Biography

P.D. James biography, plus links to book reviews and book excerpts from books by P.D. James.

P.D. James
P.D. James
Photo © Ulla Montan
Share: 

P.D. James Biography

Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park OBE, better known as P. D. James, was born on August 3 1920 in Oxford, the eldest daughter of an Inland Revenue Official.  The family moved first to Wales and then, when she was 11, to Cambridge where she attended the Cambridge High School for Girls.  Due to financial pressures at home she left school when she was 16, first following her father into the tax office, then working in a theatre where she met her husband, Ernest Connor Bantry White, who was training to be a doctor.

They married in 1941 and had two daughters during the war years - she named her second daughter after her favorite author, Jane Austen.  Connor was sent to India during World War II with the Royal Army Medical Corps and returned mentally disabled. He was repeatedly hospitalized and finally institutionalized, before he passed away in 1964.

Taking on the financial responsibility for the family, James (who had been a nurse during the war) found work as a hospital clerk and through sheer persistence and intelligence worked her way up to principal hospital administrator at the North West Regional Hospital Board, London, in charge of five psychiatric hospitals.  She wrote her first novel, Cover Her Face (the first in the Adam Dalgliesh series) on the train to and from work; it was published in 1962. In 1968, she became a principal in the criminal policy department of the British Home Office, where she worked until she was able to retire in 1979 to write full-time. 

She was a Governor for the BBC (1988-93), and Chairman of the Literature Advisory Panel at both the Arts Council of England (1988-92) and the British Council (1988-93). She was awarded the OBE in 1983 and created a Life Peer (Baroness James of Holland Park) in 1991. 

She sits in the House of Lords (the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, comparable to the US Senate) as a Conservative.  She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.  She chaired the Booker Prize Panel of Judges in 1987 and has been President of the Society of Authors since 1997.  She has also received honorary degrees from many universities including Downing College, Cambridge; St Hilda's College, Oxford and Girton College, Cambridge. 

She has been awarded major prizes for her crime writing in Great Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia. In 1999 she received the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award for long term achievement. She is published widely overseas including the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Argentina.

She says that her influences include Dorothy L. Sayers, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but that her favorite novelist is Jane Austen ("an absolute mistress of construction").

She is the author of more than 20 books, including the Inspector Adam Dagliesh Mysteries and the Cordelia Gray Mysteries. Her autobiography, Time To Be In Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, was published in 2000.

This biography was last updated on 06/14/2011.

A note about the biographies
We try to keep BookBrowse's biographies both up to date and accurate. However, with over 2000 lives to keep track of it's inevitable that some won't be as current or as complete as we would like. So, please help us - if the information about a particular author is out of date, inaccurate or simply very short, and you know of a more complete source, please let us know. Authors and those connected with authors: If you wish to make changes to your bio, please send your complete biography as you would like it displayed so that we replace the old with the new, including your website URL if relevant.

Become a Member
Click Here
Editor's Choice
  •  May 20 
  •  May 18 
  •  May 16 
Fever
Mary Beth Keane

Fever Jacket

A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
The Woman Upstairs
Claire Messud

The Woman Upstairs Jacket

The riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and betrayed by passion and desire for a world beyond her own.
How to Create the Perfect Wife
Wendy Moore

How to Create the Perfect Wife Jacket

Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Click Here
   Most Recent Blog Entries
Movies Based on Books: Summer 2013 (May - August)
Jewish Young Adult Books That Are Not About The Holocaust
Books to Give This Mother's Day
rss  RSS   rss  subscribe
Recent Reader Reviews
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Fowler
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight... read more
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on... read more
The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna van Praag
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read... read more
RSS RSS feed More...  
Most Viewed This Week
1. Half the Sky
Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn
2. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
Anna Quindlen
3. Because of Winn-Dixie
Kate DiCamillo
4. Eagle Strike
Anthony Horowitz
5. K Blows Top
Peter Carlson
More...
Book Club Recommendations
The Gods of Gotham
by Lyndsay Faye
Paperback (Mar/13)
Forgotten Country
by Catherine Chung
Paperback (Mar/13)
Philida
by André Brink
Paperback (Feb/13)
Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn
Hardback (Jun/12)
More...
First Impressions
Members read and review books often months before they're published. See what they think in First Impressions!
The Sisterhood
by Helen Bryan
Four Stars            (Apr/13)
A Dual Inheritance
by Joanna Hershon
Four Stars            (May/13)
The Laws of Gravity
by Liz Rosenberg
4.5 Stars            (May/13)
More...
  Latest BookBrowse News
British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales. (May 20 2013)
Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate... Full Story
rss RSS feed More...
 
BookBrowse Poll
Q: Which of these Summer movies based on books would you like to see? (Info on each movie here)
The Great Gatsby
Epic
Man of Steel
World War Z
The Lone Ranger
The Wolverine
R.I.P.D.
Percy Jackson
Paranoia
The Mortal Instruments
Select Any That Apply
Search: Title or Author
Free Newsletters
Bring Up the Bodies

Online Book Club
More about
Five Days
Join the discussion!


Win This Book!
The Pigeon Pie Mystery


Enter To Win Now!

wordplay
Solve this clue:
"I I M B T Give T T R"

and be entered
to win....
frame top
New Author
Interviews
Menna van Praag
Erica Brown
Helga Weiss
Kate Morton
frame bottom
HOME Book Submissions | Advertising | Library Subscriptions | Reviewing for BookBrowse | Contact Us