Bottome was born in Rochester, Kent, the daughter of an American clergyman, Rev. William MacDonald Bottome and an Englishwoman, Mary Bottome. In 1917, in Paris, she married Alban Ernan Forbes Dennis, a British diplomat working firstly in Marseilles and then in Vienna as Passport Control Officer, a cover for his real role as MI6 Head of Station with responsibility for Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Forbes Dennis died in July 1972 in Brighton. Bottome studied individual psychology under Alfred Adler while in Vienna. In 1924 she and her husband started a school in Kitzbühel in Austria. Based on the teaching of languages, the school was intended to be a community, and an educational laboratory to determine how psychology and educational theory could cure the ills of nations. One of their more famous pupils was Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels. In 1960, Fleming wrote to Bottome, "My life with you both is one of my most cherished memories, and heaven knows where I should be today without Ernan." It has been argued that Fleming took the idea of James Bond from the character Mark Chalmers in Bottome's spy novel The Lifeline. In 1935, her novel Private Worlds was made into a film. Set in a psychiatric clinic, Bottome's knowledge of individual psychology proved useful in creating a realistic scene. Bottome saw her share of trouble with Danger Signal which the Hays Office forbade from becoming a Hollywood film. Germany became Bottome's home in the late 1930s, and it inspired her novel The Mortal Storm, the film of which was the first to mention Hitler's name and be set in Nazi Germany. Bottome was an active anti-fascist. In total, four of her works – Private Worlds, The Mortal Storm, Danger Signal, The Heart of a Child – were adapted to film. In addition to fiction she is also known as an Adlerian who wrote a biography of Alfred Adler. Bottome died in London. There is a large collection of her literary papers and correspondence in the British Library acquired in 2000. A second tranche was acquired by the British Library in 2005 consisting of correspondence and literary manuscripts. The British Library also holds the Phyllis Bottome/Hodder-Salmon Papers consisting of correspondence, papers and press cuttings relating to Bottome.
From the Life, 1944, London, Faber & Faber. Six studies of the author's friends Alfred Adler, Max Beerbohm, Ivor Novello, Sara Delano Roosevelt, Ezra Pound, Margaret MacDonald Bottome.
Against Whom? 1954. By chance a patient is brought to a Sanatorium on the verge of death, how he not only recovers but manages to influence the lives of the scientists who have observed him is the subject of this novel. In the course of the book the principal characters find that they must either think of others and put that thought into practise or those same 'others' will become their enemy, and destroy, one by one, his most intimate relationships.
Eldorado Jane, 1956
Walls of Glass, 1958
The Goal, 1962 – her autobiography
Our New Order or Hitler's? A Selection of Speeches by Winston Churchill, Archbishop of Canterbury, Anthony Eden & Others, ed. by Ph. Bottome, Penguin Books Middlesex 1943
