{{Short description|British writer}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=January 2021}} {{Infobox writer | name = Janet Hitchman | birth_date = {{Birth date|df=y|1916|7|5}} | birth_place = [[Mutford]], Suffolk | death_date = {{Death date and age|df=y|1980|5|19|1916|7|5}} | death_place = [[Norwich]], Norfolk | occupation = Writer | nationality = English }}
'''Janet Hitchman''' (5 July 1916 – 19 May 1980) was a British writer.
==Life== Hitchman was born Elsie May Fields to Margaret Ames, a seamstress. On her birth certificate, her father's name was left blank. When she located her birth certificate as an adult, she found penciled on the back "Frederick Burrows, deceased 27.9.1916." Throughout her childhood she was known as Elsie Burrows. Hitchman's mother was a widow, her father a young soldier who was killed less than three months after her birth. Her mother gave the child to an elderly couple Elsie knew only as Gran and Granfer Sparkes<ref name="King">{{cite book |last1=Hitchman |first1=Janet |title=The King of the Barbareens |date=1960 |publisher=Putnam |location=London |oclc=314777531 }}</ref> and died less than two years later.<ref>{{cite web |title=England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1916–2007 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2007 |url=http://www.ancestry.com |website=Ancestry.com |accessdate=8 November 2018}}</ref> While growing up, Hitchman contracted [[mastoiditis]].<ref name="King" />
Hitchman's childhood, which she recalled in her 1960 memoir, ''The King of the Barbareens'', was spent being passed from foster home to foster home, along with stints in hospitals, a home for mentally handicapped women, and the Thomas Anguish Hospital School of Housecraft for Girls in Norwich. At fourteen, she was sent to Dr. [[Thomas John Barnardo]]'s children's facility in [[Barkingside]]. Hitchman would later write an account of Barnardo's work, ''They Carried the Sword''. While at Barnardo's, she gave herself the name Janet, adopted from ''[[Jane Eyre]]''.<ref name="King" />
From Barnardo's, she was sent to a boarding house in London. She spent the next few years working a variety of jobs, ending up as a stage manager with a small theatre company. It was here she met her husband, Michael Hitchman. Together, they had a daughter, but in 1946 they divorced. Hitchman spent much of the next decade in a series of domestic jobs. She returned to [[Norfolk]], where she lived for the rest of her life.<ref name="King" />
After the publication of ''The King of the Barbareens'', she earned her living as a freelance writer, writing broadcast pieces for the [[BBC]] and articles and reviews for a variety of publications. She wrote one novel, ''Meeting for Burial'', which was set in a [[Quaker]] community based on the one she had joined in Norwich.
She was commissioned to write a biography of [[Dorothy L. Sayers]], but was hampered by the lack of access to Sayers' private papers and members of her family. Despite this, the book, ''Such a Strange Lady'', received some good reviews. Writing in the ''[[New York Times]]'', Louise Bernikow called it "awfully intelligent, compassionate, interesting and, as they say, a very good read."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Bernikow |first1=Louis |title="Such a Strange Lady" |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1975/11/09/archives/such-a-strange-lady.html |work=The New York Times |date=9 November 1975}}</ref> In ''[[The American Scholar (magazine)|The American Scholar]]'', [[Carolyn Gold Heilbrun]] described it as "unsound, unfair and distressing".<ref>{{cite magazine |last= Heilbrun|first=Carolyn G. |date=Autumn 1982 |title=Dorothy L. Sayers: Biography Between the Lines |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41210881 |magazine=The American Scholar |location= Washington D.C. |publisher=The Phi Beta Kappa Society |jstor=41210881 |access-date=23 July 2023}} {{subscription required}}</ref>
Hitchman was working on a life of the author, [[Ouida]], when she diagnosed with an inoperable cancer in 1978.<ref>{{cite news |title=Miss Janet Hitchman |work=The Times |date=21 May 1980 |url=https://www.thetimes.com/archive/article/1980-05-21/18/19.html |access-date=8 December 2018 |url-access=subscription }}</ref> In her last 18 months, she recorded a series of interviews for BBC producer [[Hallam Tennyson (radio producer)|Hallam Tennyson]] in which she talked about her coming death. The resulting piece, "The Fact of Death," was broadcast on [[BBC Radio 4]] in December 1980.<ref>{{cite web |title=BBC Genome – Radio Four – 2 December 1980 |url=https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/radio4/fm/1980-12-02 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141019161928/http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/radio4/fm/1980-12-02 |url-status=dead |archive-date=19 October 2014 |accessdate=8 December 2018}}</ref>
== Books ==
*{{cite book |last1=Hitchman |first1=Janet |title=The King of the Barbareens |date=1960 |publisher=Putnam |location=London |oclc=314777531}} *{{Cite book |title=They carried the sword |last=Hitchman |first=Janet |date=1966 |publisher=Gollancz |location=London |language=English |oclc=2572260}} *{{Cite book |title=Meeting for burial |last=Hitchman |first=Janet |date=1968 |publisher=Atheneum |location=New York |language=English |oclc=448549}} *{{Cite book |title=Such a strange lady: a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers |last=Hitchman |first=Janet |date=1976 |publisher=Avon |location=New York |language=English |oclc=1036868611}}
== References == {{Reflist}} {{authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hitchman, Janet}} [[Category:1916 births]] [[Category:1980 deaths]] [[Category:20th-century English novelists]]