Ariana Franklin

A pseudonym used by Diana Norman

Ariana Franklin was born in London just before World War II. During the war, she and her parents lived with her father's uncle, a minister in Winston Churchill's wartime cabinet. In London, Ariana had a privileged life, with a nanny, a maid and a chauffeur. But eventually her mother got tired of the constant air raids, so they went to live with Ariana's maternal grandparents in the seaside town of Torquay in Devonshire, leaving her father behind permanently.

To earn money, she left school at fifteen. Ariana had a great love of journalism-perhaps the only thing inherited from her father, a correspondent for the Timesso she looked for work in that field.

Marriage to a fellow journalist, Barry Norman, and Fleet Street didn't mix he was always flying into the country as she flew out of it. So, not wanting another divorce in the family, Ariana gave up her newspaper career and instead settled down in the country, giving birth to two daughters within fourteen months of each other.With a child on either hip, she continued to write. Anything. Magazine articles, biographies, ghost stories. Most of all, history, especially women's history.