Lois Deacon was born at Tamerton Foliot, Devon, and began writing poems and short stories in her youth. Her work began to appear in journals and popular periodicals in the 1930s and 1940s, her 1940s poems appearing in more literary journals, such as Poetry Review . Her first commercial book, So I went my way, a double biography of William Mason and his wife Mary, appeared in 1951; but her major work was a series of books she wrote concerning Thomas Hardy, especially concentrating on Hardy's relationships with women. The first two of these, Tryphena and Thomas Hardy and Hardy's Sweetest Image were published by small presses in 1962 and 1964; her work found a wider audience with the publication of Providence and Mr Hardy in 1966 (Hutchinson). Later books on Hardy were published by the Toucan Press in Guernsey. She lived in Chagford, on the edge of Dartmoor (about which she also wrote in later life), and died there in November 1984.
From the guide to the Lois Deacon Collection, 1930s-1984, (University of Exeter)
