Daisy Ashford

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Daisy Ashford, full name Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (1881-1972) was an English writer who is most famous for writing The Young Visiters, or, Mister Salteena's Plan (ISBN 0-89733-365-9), a novella parodying the upper class society of late 19th century England, when she was just nine years old. The novella was published in 1919 with a foreword by J.M. Barrie and remains in print in the United Kingdom to this day.

Ashford's name was also sometimes used as a way to criticize adult authors of the 1920s if their style was deemed too childish or naïve; Edmund Wilson referred to the novel This Side of Paradise by his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald as "a classic in a class with The Young Visiters."

Ashford wrote one other short novel, The Hangman's Daughter, as well as several short stories. She stopped writing as a teenager.