Ann Stafford was the pen-name of Anne Isabel Stafford Branfoot, later Pedler (1901-66). 

Her family came from County Durham, where her grandfather ran the Tyzack and Branfoot Steam Shipping Company, which he left after the First World War. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies College and Newnham College Cambridge, where she graduated in French and Russian. She completed a PhD at Kings College London in 1926 in Russian social history. She also studied art in Paris during the university vacations, and her illustrations to some of her books are skilled and arresting. She married the barrister Tom Simpson Pedler (1891-1975) in 1926, but was no longer living with him from the early 1930s, by which time she had a son, John.

She worked at the Times Book Club in the early 1930s, where Helen Evans was her secretary. She and Helen collaborated on their first joint novel, Business as Usual (1933), as well as on newspaper features. Ann became a children's author and the author of romance and historical novels from the 1930s to 1960s, including many written with Helen as Jane Oliver, and under a joint pen-name as Joan Blair.

Ann met the Polish writer Michael ‘Misha’ Lubin at an International PEN Club meeting in France in the 1930s, and she was able to sponsor Lubin and his family to come to the UK before Nazi Germany prevented Polish Jews from leaving at the beginning of the Second World War.

During the war Ann was a volunteer ambulance driver from the Paddington ambulance station and was in charge of an East End advice bureau. After Helen’s husband was killed in 1940 she shared Ann’s house with her and John in St John’s Wood, London. Later the two close friends lived next door to each other in North Gorley, Fordingbridge, Hampshire. Ann died in 1966 in Salisbury, looked after by Helen.

Handheld Press presents a fearful anthology of forgotten stories to persuade you that a stone hand has been placed on your shoulder when you least expect it, or that something heavy is scraping its way up the stairs. Well-known authors of the uncanny such as Eleanor Scott, Edith Wharton, H P Lovecraft and Arthur Machen are showcased with long-forgotten masters and mistresses of supernatural short stories to frighten the heart into some loud thumpings.

The Living Stone

 

Master Sacristan Eberhart, by Sabine Baring-Gould        

The Marble Hands, by W W Fenn         

The Mask, by Robert W Chambers       

The Stone Rider!, by Nellie K Blissett    

A Marble Woman, by W C Morrow      

The Duchess at Prayer, by Edith Wharton         

Benlian, by Oliver Onions         

The Marble Hands, by Bernard Capes   

Hypnos, by H P Lovecraft         

The Ceremony, by Arthur Machen       

At Simmel Acres Farm, by Eleanor Scott           

The Maker of Gargoyles, by Clark Ashton Smith            

The Menhir, by N Dennett       

The Living Stone, E R Punshon  

The Statue, by James Causey   

Something in Wood, by August Derleth