Janice Elliott was a prolific English fiction writer, journalist and children's writer. Her novels were critically successful in their time, but are not currently in print.
Life
Elliott was born in Derby to the advertising executive Douglas John Elliott and his wife, Dorothy Wilson. and raised in Nottingham. She attended Nottingham Girls' High School and then read English at St. Anne's College, Oxford University. She worked as a journalist in 1952–62, notably for House and Garden and the Sunday Times, and then became a full-time writer, while continuing to write freelance reviews for major newspapers and periodicals. In the meantime she married Robert Cooper, an oil executive and sailor, in 1959 and had a son. She lived in Partridge Green, Sussex, for many years, before retiring in the mid-1980s to Fowey, Cornwall. Janice Elliott received a Southern Arts award in 1981, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1989. She died in 1995.
Novels
Elliott's debut novelCave with Echoes was published by Secker & Warburg in 1962. This, like almost all her subsequent novels, was received with enthusiasm. Anthony Burgess commented that it had style, was genuinely constructed and that the characters were excellent. The Somnabulists featured a brother and sister alienated by their parents' early deaths. Secret Places was set in a girls' boarding school during World War II, and The Country of Her Dreams in a Balkan city picked to house a nuclear bunker for European art. Another novel, The Italian Lesson was published by Hodder & Stoughton, as was most of her speculative fiction. Several of her non-domestic novels used disturbing scenarios. Dr Gruber's Daughter, for example, has Adolf Hitler hiding in an attic in North Oxford in 1953, while his daughter roams the streets looking for human and feline victims to devour. The King Awakes and The Empty Throne, 1987 and 1988 novels illustrated by Grahame Baker, form an "Arthurian sequence for older children", also known as The Sword and the Dream after the title of its two-volume reissue. Commenting on her work, Janice Elliott wrote, "I have always tried to avoid writing in a way that might invite categorisation in either subject matter or treatment. The result is a body of work ranging from the bizarre and darkly magical... to social realism." Elliott worked methodically at her writings, from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. each day, taking around nine months on average to write each novel. Yet despite her critical success, she found it hard to make a living out of fiction writing.
Films
Her novel The Buttercup Chain was made into a film of the same title, for which she worked on the screenplay. Also made the basis of a 1984 film were her wartime memoirs of Nottingham, Secret Places.
