Ursula Harvey Bloom was born on 11 December 1892 in
Springfield, Chelmsford, Essex, the daughter of the Reverend
James Harvey Bloom, about whom she wrote a biography,
Parson Extraordinary. She also wrote about her
gypsy ("
Diddicoy") great-grandmother, Frances Graver (born 1809), who was known as the "Rose of Norfolk", a sobriquet used by Bloom as the title of her biography. Bloom lived for a number of years in
Stratford-upon-Avon, which was the subject of another book,
Rosemary for Stratford-upon-Avon. She wrote her first book at the age of seven.
Charles Dickens was always a dominant influence: she had read every book of his before she was ten years of age, and then re-read them in her teens. A prolific author, she wrote over 500 books, an achievement that earned her recognition in the 1975 edition of
Guinness World Records. Many of her novels were written under various
pen names, including
Sheila Burns,
Mary Essex,
Rachel Harvey,
Deborah Mann,
Lozania Prole and
Sara Sloane. She appeared frequently on British
television. Her journalistic experiences were written about in her book
The Mightier Sword. Her hobbies included
needlework, which she exhibited, and
cooking. She was a Fellow of the
Royal Historical Society. Ursula Bloom married twice: firstly, in 1916, to Captain Arthur Brownlow Denham-Cookes of the
24th (Queen's) London Regiment, late of the
Inner Temple (son of Colonel George Denham-Cookes of the
3rd King's Own Light Dragoons and Hon. Clara, daughter of
Charles Brownlow, 2nd Baron Lurgan), in the face of his family's "sniffy disapproval"; his aristocratic mother was by this time a wealthy widow, of Prince's Gate,
Knightsbridge. Their son, George Philip ("Pip") Jocelyn, was born in 1917 (he married in 1944, Lorna Jean Iris, daughter of Charles Lawson, of
Romford, and had issue). Arthur died of
influenza in 1918, in the final days of the war. In 1925 she married Charles Gower Robinson (d. 1979), a Royal Navy Paymaster Commander; they lived at 191, Cranmer Court, London
SW3. She died on 29 October 1984, aged 91, in a nursing home in
Nether Wallop, Hampshire. == List of works ==