Best remembered for her Punchbowl Farm and Romney Marsh book series, this twentieth-century British children's novelist published such popular individual titles as Wish for a Pony, The Badgers of Punchbowl Farm, and No Going Back. Born Monica le Doux Newton in Derbyshire, England, she grew up as the daughter of a minister and studied at Wakefield Girls' High School and St. Brandon's School. Early in her life, she was deeply affected by the sinking of the Mary Stanford Lifeboat off the coast of Great Britain; she lost seventeen friends, including a teenage love, in the disaster, and later published a book -- Storm Ahead -- about the accident.
