Alice Askew

Born in London on June 18, 1874, Alice Askew was a British author who published fiction before and during her marriage, though she became best known for the novels she wrote with Claude Askew. Together they were remarkably productive, turning out a long run of popular novels and stories that reached a wide reading audience in the years before and during World War I.

The Aske​ws were not only literary collaborators. During the war they became closely involved with Serbia, carrying out relief work and later writing about the country's suffering in wartime. That experience gave their public lives an unusual intensity, linking their names not just with popular fiction but also with eyewitness accounts of a major European crisis.

Their story ended suddenly and tragically on October 6, 1917, when they died at sea after the ship Città di Bari was torpedoed. That loss gave Alice Askew's career a poignant final chapter: a hardworking novelist whose adventurous and public-spirited life was cut short in wartime.