Margaret Jepson was born in 1907, the daughter of mystery/detective author and critic
Edgar Jepson and Frieda Jepson, a concert pianist who was the daughter of the musician
Henry Holmes. Margaret's brother was the writer
Selwyn Jepson. She attended London City College and Ealing Technical College Library School and the Slade School of Art. In 1928 she married a young doctor, Frank Thornton Birkinshaw, who was a veteran of
World War I. In 1929 their daughter Jane was born, followed by another daughter in 1931, whom Margaret named Franklin Birkinshaw, but who is better known as feminist writer
Fay Weldon. In 1930 the Birkinshaws emigrated to New Zealand, where Frank found a position at a practice in
Christchurch. {{Blockquote|text=Margaret was beautiful, bohemian, fey. She read horoscopes, painted tarot cards, saw visions of angels in the park, and wrote novels under the nom de plume Pearl Bellairs – the name of the vapid novelist in Aldous Huxley's
Crome Yellow. She was singularly unsuited to being a New Zealand doctor's wife. In 1936 Margaret and Frank agreed to separate, later divorcing in 1940. She returned alone to London on a cargo ship, planning to send for her children as soon as possible. When her husband threatened to take his daughters to South Africa, she returned to New Zealand to collect them. She began writing romance novels and stories that were published as serials to support her daughters. World War II forced her to find other work. She took a variety of jobs, such as painting ladies' powder-boxes. Along with her mother, who joined her in 1942, she worked in her own small ad agency, writing copy and working in film. She also secretly scratched away at her "magnum opus", a treatise on morality and aesthetics that according to her daughter's autobiography ran to "thousands of overwritten pages, which would get in a hopeless muddle on the kitchen table". In 1946, when the war was over, Margaret, Frieda, and Margaret's daughters returned to England on the MV
Rangatini. Margaret and the children moved to West Cornwall. Her obituary in
The Times states that she considered this to be one of the worst mistakes of her life, because it led to her daughter Jane being introduced to
the printer Guido Morris, who she later married. In the 1960s, her daughter Jane was abandoned by her husband, Guido Morris, suffered from mental illness and later died from brain cancer in 1969 at the age of 40, leaving behind three children. Margaret took over the care of her grandchildren. In 2000, Jepson broke her hip, after which she moved into a residential home, then a nursing home where she died. Jepson features as a character in her daughter Fay Weldon's novel
Chalcot Crescent (2010). ==Career==