E. B. C. Jones

Emily Beatrix Coursolles Jones (15 April 1893 – 30 June 1966) was a British writer (pen-name "E. B. C. Jones") whose novels focused on the social and psychological traumas of World War I, on large-family dynamics among young adult siblings, and on relationships among the "liberated" middle-class intelligentsia of the Twenties.

She was also known in the interwar period as a reviewer of contemporary fiction in British literary journals, notably in The Adelphi.

Life

Emily Beatrix Coursolles Jones (known as "Topsy" to her friends) was born on 15 April 1893 in London. She was the youngest of eight children of Major Charles Jones (1840–1896) of the Royal Artillery and Mary Jane Ross (1855–1936). She was educated for a time in Paris, where she got to know historian Eileen Power, a university friend (at Girton College, Cambridge) of her older sister Margaret ("Puppy") Jones (who was at Newnham) – but unlike her sister, she did not go on to college. Five of the six Jones sisters, including Topsy, appeared, "thinly disguised", in a 1919 novel by another Girton graduate, Romer Wilson, If All These Young Men. (Three of the sisters had given 'suffragist' as their occupation on the 1911 census form.) Their brother Edward (b.1878), husband of social reformer Margery Spring Rice, was killed in July 1916 in the Battle of the Somme.

Jones's first book was a volume of poetry, Windows (1917). The following year, she edited an anthology of recent poetry, Songs for Sale, which one critic found to be generally unadventurous and too indebted to Britain's poet laureate, Robert Bridges, although one of Jones's own poems was singled out as a happy exception.

Jones's first novel, Quiet Interior, was published in 1920 and praised by such notable contemporary authors as Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West.