Couching at the Door

Written by D.K. Broster

Narrated by Richard Mitchley and Ghizela Rowe

Dorothy Kathleen Broster was born on 2nd September 1877 at Devon Lodge in Grassendale Park, Garston, Liverpool.

At 16, the family moved to Cheltenham, where she attended Cheltenham Ladies' College and then on to St Hilda’s College, Oxford to read history, where she was one of the first female students, although at this time women were not awarded degrees.

Broster served as secretary to Charles Harding Firth, a Professor of History for several years, and collaborated on several of his works. Her first two novels were co-written with a college friend, Gertrude Winifred Taylor.

With the Great War interrupting her literary ambitions she served as a Red Cross nurse at a Franco-American hospital, but returned to England with a knee infection in 1916.

After the war, she moved near to Battle in East Sussex and took up writing full-time.

In 1920 she at last received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Oxford.

Her novels, mainly historical fiction, peaked in popularity with ‘The Flight of the Heron’, in 1925, a best-seller followed up by two sequels.

As well as poetry and various articles she also wrote several short stories, the best known of which is a classic of weird fiction ‘The Couching at the Door’ in which an artist appears to be haunted by a mysterious entity.

An intensely private individual many readers deduced from her name that she was both a man and Scottish.

D K Broster died in Bexhill Hospital on 7th February 1950. She was 73.<

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781803540801

D.K. Broster

Dorothy Kathleen Broster was born in 1877 near Liverpool. She attended St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and earned an Honours degree in Modern History in 1898, but the degree was not officially awarded until 1920, when the university finally allowed a generation of women scholars to receive their degrees. During the First World War, Broster volunteered as a nurse, and in 1915 she went to France with the British Red Cross. In peacetime she worked as the secretary for the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and during this time she began writing historical fiction. Her name was made by her bestselling Jacobite trilogy, The Flight of the Heron (1925), The Gleam in the North (1927), and The Dark Mile (1929). Most of her supernatural fiction appears in two collections: A Fire of Driftwood (1932) and Couching at the Door (1942). Broster never married but had a close friendship with Gertrude Schlich which lasted from the time of the First World War to Broster’s death in 1950.