Ursula Orange

Ursula Orange (1909 – 1955) was a mid-20th-century British novelist who is known for focusing her books on the domestic lives and career aspirations of young women. Biography Little has been written about Ursula Orange's life. She was born Ursula Marguerite Dorothea Orange in 1909, the daughter of Hugh William Orange, who received a knighthood for contributions to education in India. Her paternal grandfather was the medical pioneer William Orange CB, MD, FRCP, LSA, second superintendent of Broadmoor Hospital. She married a man named Dennis Tindall with whom she had a daughter, the writer Gillian Tindall. She was for a time the assistant secretary for the British Poetry Society. According to her daughter, who wrote about her in the autobiographical 2009 book Footprints in Paris, her death in 1955 at the age of 46 was by suicide. Books Orange wrote a total of six novels, which have been called "unjustly forgotten". She wrote in a lightly comic vein that concealed serious intentions, and her style has been referred to as "the Angela Thirkell school at its best." Her protagonists tended to be young women of middle-class upbringing who were grappling with the challenges of jobs, children, and romantic entanglements. For example, her first novel, Begin Again (1936), is about several young women who are dissatisfied with their lives in various ways—some are tired of their London jobs while others long to leave the country for London or to have exciting affairs. Of this book, one critic remarked that the women are deftly drawn with a light comic touch but the male characters are somewhat dimmer.