Phyllis Dorothy James was born on 3 August 1920, in Oxford, England, the daughter of Inland Revenue officer Sidney Victor and Dorothy May Amelia Hone James. Her mother suffered from recurrent bouts of depression and had to be hospitalized on a regular basis. The family moved to Cambridge, where James attended Cambridge High School for Girls. She left school at age sixteen to work in a tax office and then became an assistant stage manager at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge. (This stage experience led to her own play, A Private Treason, staged in 1985 in London's West End.) When World War II began, she worked for the Red Cross as a nurse and then for the Ministry of Food.
On 8 August 1941 James married Ernest Conner Bantry White, a physician with the Royal Army Medical Corps. The couple had two daughters--Clare, born in 1942, and Jane, born in 1944. White returned from his wartime service suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, a circumstance that forced James to work full-time to support her family as her husband went in and out of hospitals.
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