October 4, 1932

The reputation of the writer Ann Thwaite, (October 4, 1932) is based on books such as

Waiting for the Party: the life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1974,
Edmund Gosse: a literary landscape, 1984 (which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize),
A. A. Milne: his life, 1990 (winner of the Whitbread Biography Award);
Emily Tennyson: the poet’s wife, 1996;
and,
Glimpses of the Wonderful: the life of Philip Henry Gosse, 2002;

She also edited, Portraits from Life: essays by Edmund Gosse, (1991) in which she mentions that Gosse was a cat-lover.

Ann Thwaite was born in London, She married in 1955 the poet Anthony Thwaite and in 1959 received an MA from St. Hilda's College, Oxford. She and her husband have four children which may have been handy since Ann Thwaite was a regular reviewer of children’s books: for TLS, and the Guardian, from 1963–1985.

Her own story "Feeding the Cats" was included in the Oxford Book of Children's Stories (1993).

Thwaite's Who's Who writeup, from which we learned most of the above, includes her listing of her recreations. She charmingly mentioned on that topic: "Other people’s lives", and "messing about on the river."

The Thwaites live at The Mill House, Low Tharston, Norfolk.