Helen Ashton


Helen Rosaline Ashton Jordan was a British novelist, literary biographer, and physician.

Life

Helen Rosaline Ashton was born in Kensington, London, the daughter of Emma Burnie and Arthur Jacob Ashton, KC, Recorder of Manchester. Her brother was Sir Leigh Ashton, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
She published her first novel in 1913, Pierrot in Town. During World War I, she nursed as a VAD, and over the course of the war she published two more novels.
After the war, Ashton studied medicine, qualifying from the London Hospital in 1921 and graduating M.B., B.S. in 1922. She was then a house physician at Great Ormond Street Hospital until she married Arthur Jordan, a barrister, in 1927. After her marriage, Ashton retired from medicine but continued to write.
Over forty-five years she published twenty-six books, which included a literary biography, I Had a Sister, and several biographical novels, including William and Dorothy and Parson Austen's Daughter. Her first major fictional success was Doctor Serocold in which she was able to draw upon her medical knowledge. Her other successful novels included Bricks and Mortar, republished in 2004 by Persephone Books, and Yeoman's Hospital, on which the 1951 film White Corridors was based.
She died at age sixty-six, on June 27, 1958, in Lechlade, Gloucestershire.

Novels