[Robert] Geoffrey Trease was born in Nottingham in 1909, the son of a wine merchant and a doctor's daughter. He was educated at Nottingham High School and Queen's College, Oxford. He married Marian Boyer in 1933. Trease was employed in a variety of teaching and publishing jobs before becoming a full-time writer. His first book, Bows Against the Barons (1934), was a historical children's novel about Robin Hood. In addition to literary criticism, Trease wrote both fiction and non-fiction for children and adults.
His greatest success lay in historical fiction. Word to Caesar (1955), Tomorrow is a Stranger (1987) and Song for a Tattered Flag (1992) were historical novels spanning a variety of periods and settings. His autobiographical works include A Whiff of Burnt Boats (Macmillan, 1971) and Laughter at the Door (Macmillan, 1974). D.H. Lawrence: The Phoenix and the Flame (Macmillan, 1973), Samuel Pepys and His World (Thomas and Hudson, 1972), and Portrait of a Cavalier: a Biography of William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle (Macmillan, 1979) are his main biographical works. Geoffrey Trease died in 1998.
From the guide to the Annotated typescript of, Portrait of a Cavalier: a biography of William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, by Geoffrey Trease (1909-1998), author, 1979, 1979, (The University of Nottingham)
