Ursula Bloom


Ursula Bloom was a British novelist.

Biography

Ursula Harvey Bloom was born on 11 December 1892 in Springfield, Chelmsford, Essex, the daughter of the Reverend James Harvey Bloom, whom she wrote about in a biography entitled Parson Extraordinary. She also wrote about her great-grandmother, Frances Graver, who was of gypsy birth. Graver became known as the "Rose of Norfolk", a sobriquet used by Bloom as the title of her biography. Bloom lived for a number of years in Stratford-upon-Avon, which was the subject of another book, Rosemary for Stratford-upon-Avon.
She wrote her first book at the age of seven. Charles Dickens was always a dominant influence: she had read every book of his before she was ten years of age, and then re-read them in her teens. A prolific author, she wrote over 500 books, an achievement that earned her recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records. Many of her novels were written under pseudonyms, including Sheila Burns, Mary Essex, Rachel Harvey, Deborah Mann, Lozania Prole and Sara Sloane. She appeared frequently on British television. Her journalistic experiences were written about in her book The Mightier Sword
Her hobbies included needlework, which she exhibited, and cooking.
Ursula Bloom married twice. Her first husband was Arthur Brownlow Denham-Cookes, whom she married in 1916 and with whom she had a son, Pip, born in 1917. Arthur died of influenza in 1918, in the final days of the war. In 1925 she married Charles Gower Robinson, a Royal Navy Commander. She died on 29 October 1984, aged 91, in a nursing home in Nether Wallop, Hampshire.

Works