She left all of her money to the National Trust, and no hint of any scandal or love affair behind her. Her death in 1952 was overshadowed by the state funeral of George VI. She was a great friend of John Gielgud, Edith Evans and other famous actors of the time, but she remained almost obsessively private, keeping her final disease a secret even from those closest to her. She grew up in Scotland, trained as a physical education teacher, never married and tended to her invalid father for many years before embarking upon her literary career. Josephine Tey was one of the pseudonyms used by the writer born Elizabeth Mackintosh in 1896 at Inverness. We only know the bare bones about her life, however. For that reason alone, this author deserves to be more widely read and celebrated, but her whole body of work is worth rediscovering. Yet at least one of these, The Daughter of Time, is regularly found on lists of the top 10 or 20 crime fiction books of all time. Nowadays it’s dedicated aficionados of Golden Age detective fiction who read her, and often only a couple of novels.
Back in the 1930s and 40s, Josephine Tey was one of the UK’s most celebrated playwrights and novelists.
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