As a young woman, she lived a bohemian existence in London as suffragette, artist's model, and artist, studying painting with Walter Sickert when she was nineteen. But she also moved in the world of the international set. During World War I she served in an English hospital and then in 1918 as an ambulance driver in France. In 1920 she married Sir Roderick Jones, owner and director of Reuters News Agency; the marriage lasted until his death in 1962; the couple had four children. As Lady Jones she led a busy social life. As Enid Bagnold she had an active and distinguished career as a writer. On 31 March 1981 she died at the age of ninety-one at her home in North London.
Published in 1918, A Diary Without Dates, about her days as a nurse's aide before and during the war, led to Bagnold's expulsion from the hospital. The Sailing Ships and Other Poems had been published the previous year (she had been writing poetry since she was nine). Her first two novels were published under the pseudonym A Lady of Quality out of deference to her father who did not care much for fiction. The Happy Foreigner (1920) is a love story set against the backdrop of France after the time of the armistice.
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