Dorothy Emily Stevenson

Dorothy Emily Stevenson was a Scottish author of more than 40 highly popular novels as well as three volumes of poetry.

Publishing under the gender-neutral name D. E. Stevenson, she was hugely successful during her lifetime, with her light-hearted, funny and gently comforting novels selling no less than four million books in the UK and a further three million in the USA.

Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1892. Her father was the lighthouse engineer David Alan Stevenson, first cousin to the author Robert Louis Stevenson. She was educated at home by a governess and started to write at the age of eight. But she kept her writing secret at first, due to the disapproval of her parents, who also forbade her from going to university.

In 1934, she published her first novel, ‘Mrs Buncle’s Book’, an entertaining story whose central character, an unmarried woman, lives in a small village and writes a novel about it in order to try and supplement her meagre income. Thereafter, Stevenson wrote approximately one book a year for the rest of her life.

Stevenson was 81 when she died and is buried in Moffat, Dumfriesshire where she lived with her family from 1943 and where she wrote most of her books.

In 2009, interest in Stevenson’s writing resurfaced, with reissues of several of her most popular novels, including ‘Mrs. Tim of the Regiment’ and ‘Miss Buncle Married’, the sequel to her debut novel.