Elizabeth Cambridge

	Elizabeth Cambridge in 1913

'ELIZABETH CAMBRIDGE' was the pseudonym of Barbara née Webber, a doctor's daughter who was born in 1893 in Rickmansworth just outside London. She was brought up first in Plymouth and then in Westgate-on-Sea and went to Les Marroniers finishing school in Paris; her first short stories were published when she was 17.  She went on writing stories until war broke out in 1914, when she was briefly a VAD before marrying George Hodges, a country doctor's son who was himself a doctor. The Hodges lived in Deddington near Oxford and had two sons and a daughter. Hostages to Fortune, Elizabeth Cambridge's first novel, was published in 1933; five more novels followed between 1934 and 1940, all receiving great critical acclaim. In the late 1940s she and her husband moved to a village near Battle in Sussex, where she died of tuberculosis in 1949.