Norah Hoult

Norah "Ella" Hoult (10 September 1898 – 6 April 1984) was an Irish writer of novels and short stories.

She was born in Dublin. Her mother, Margaret O'Shaughnessy, was a Catholic girl who eloped at the age of 21 with a Protestant English architect named Powis Hoult. Both Norah's parents died while she was still a child, and she and her brother were sent to live with their father's relations in England, where they were educated in various boarding schools.[1]

Her first book, Poor Women!, appeared in 1928.[2] This collection of five short stories received considerable critical acclaim, and has been reprinted several times, both individually and in selected editions. It was followed by a novel, Time Gentlemen! Time! (1930), which deals with a woman's unhappy marriage to an alcoholic.

She married the writer Oliver Stonor, and lived with him at The Cottage in Windsor Great Park for a year, but returned to Ireland to collect material for her writing from 1931 to 1937. The marriage was dissolved in 1934. Her next two books, Holy Ireland (1935) and its sequel Coming from the Fair (1937), show Irish family life before World War I.

In 1939 she settled in London, in Bayswater, not far from Violet Hunt upon whom Claire Temple in There Were No Windows[3] (1944) is modelled.[4] In 1957 she returned to live in Ireland.[5]

In 1977 she published her last book.[6] She died at Jonquil Cottage, Greystones, County Wicklow, on April 6, 1984.[7]

She was a friend of the Scottish writer Fred Urquhart and some of their correspondence is preserved in his archive.[8]