Daisy Ashford

Margaret Mary Julia "Daisy" Ashford was an English writer born in 1881. As a child she wrote stories for her family’s amusement, and at nine she completed The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena’s Plan, a novella about upper-class society that kept all its original youthful spelling and punctuation when it was finally published in 1919.

The book became a sensation, with readers delighted by its mix of social ambition, confidence, and unintentional comedy. Ashford had written other juvenilia too, but The Young Visiters remained the work most closely linked with her name and gave her an unusual place in literary history as a genuine child author whose early voice reached a wide adult audience.

She lived until 1972, long enough to see lasting interest in the book she had written in childhood. What makes her memorable is not just the novelty of her age, but how vividly and entertainingly she captured the world she was imagining.