Elisabeth Kyle

Elisabeth Kyle, pseudonym of Agnes Mary Robertson Dunlop, (born 1 January 1901, died 23 February 1982), was a Scottish journalist and writer of novels, children's books and travel literature.

She used the pen name Jan Ralston for publication of one of her books in the United States. Some of her journalism was published under the name Mary Forsyth.

Biography
Agnes Mary Robertson Dunlop was born in Ayr, Scotland on 1 January 1901. Her mother was Elizabeth Riddell Dunlop and her father was James Dunlop, a lawyer in the family firm. He was keen on literature, introducing his daughter to the classics and monitoring the books to which she was exposed. He died when she was nine years old.

As a child she had no particular intention of becoming an author, and when she finished her education became a journalist, first with the Manchester Guardian and then with the Glasgow Herald. Her journalism includes articles about other Scottish women writers such as Mary Cleland and Nan Shepherd. She wrote the regular "Ways of Women" column in the Nottingham Evening Post in the 1930s.

Kyle's earliest published works were stories in children's annuals. A large part of her output was books for children, published between the 1930s and 1980. Many of these were historical novels designed for a young audience, with heroines such as Charlotte Brontë, Mary II of England, Florence Nightingale and Clara Schumann. She wrote several novels for adults, including The Begonia Bed (1934), The Pleasure Dome (1943), The Tontine Belle (1951), and The Other Miss Evans (1958).

She gave radio talks and wrote radio plays for children and adults. One of her novels for adults, The Regent's Candlesticks (1954), was broadcast on the BBC Light Programme as Book at Bedtime in 1995. She also adapted other books for radio, such as Neil Munro's The Daft Days in 1937. In 1939 she was described in the Berwickshire News and General Advertiser as "well known as a writer for Children’s Hour, particularly in the adaptations she has made of folk tales". Her first radio talk was given on Yugoslavia and was in 1941.

Kyle travelled extensively; at the time of the publication of her first novel in 1934 she was said in the Nottingham Evening Press, to have travelled around Scandinavia by "tramp steamer", and to "know the Balkan States and their people more or less intimately". The Liverpool Post in the same year described her as "wander[ing] about Europe and America in a more or less vagabond way in order to stisfy her craving for adventure".

Dunlop was a friend of Josephine Tey and corresponded with her.