Priscilla Napier (5 October 1908 - 10 October 1998) was an English author, specializing in biography.
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Born at Oxford in 1908, Hayter was the daughter of Sir William Hayter, an adviser to the Egyptian government, and his wife, Alethea Slessor, daughter of a Hampshire rector. Her brother, Sir William Goodenough Hayter (1906–1995), became British ambassador to the Soviet Union and Warden of New College, Oxford,[1] while her sister Alethea Hayter (1911–2006) was a literary biographer.[2][3]
She spent her early years in Cairo, and later wrote of her mother and her aunts that they were "true Victorians: not in a general way frightened of murder and sudden death, but perfectly terrified of insects".[2]
Napier was educated at Downe House School, in Berkshire, which was then under the headship of its founder Olive Willis, and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she graduated (like her sister Aletha three years later) BA in modern history.[2]
At the age of twenty-two, Priscilla Hayter married Trevylyan Napier, a Royal Navy officer and a scion of the Napier family of Merchiston. A Napier ancestor had arrived in Somerset from Scotland in the reign of Henry VII, and Trevylyan Napier's father, like his grandfather, was a Vice-Admiral. After her husband was killed on active service in 1940, Priscilla Napier was left to bring up their son and two daughters. She then developed a writing career based on studies of her dead husband's family. She also published poetry and an autobiography.[2]