Alice and Claude Askew
Alice and Claude Askew were a prolific writing team, who, in their relatively short writing career, were responsible for producing over ninety novels. Alice had been born in London in 1874, the daughter of Henry Leake who, at the time, was a Captain in the 70th (Surrey) Regiment of Foot. As a young woman of an upper-middle class background, she had taken to writing for her own amusement, having her first short story published in the Belgravia in 1894. Claude, meanwhile, was born in 1865, and was the son of the Reverend John Askew. He was born in Kensington in London, and attended Eton, before later studying medicine.
The pair married in London in 1900 and began writing together shortly afterwards. Their first novel, The Shulamite, was published in 1904; this would prove to be a hit, becoming a successful stage play in 1906 and later, in 1915, becoming a film. The success of The Shulamite encouraged them to commit to writing as a profession, and they would go on to become one of the most productive writing partnerships of the Edwardian era. Their method would typically be that one would have a particular idea and start writing the story, before passing it over to the other for completion and refinement. This contributed to their productivity and, ultimately, their success, for there would rarely be a point at which one of their novels was not the subject of a newspaper serialisation.
When the First World War erupted in 1914, the Askews volunteered for service in Munro's Red Cross Ambulance Corps. They were witnesses to the early part of the war in Belgium, and based one of their final books, The Tocsin, on their experiences in the country. In 1915 they would travel to Serbia, where they witnessed the invasion of the country and the terrible aftermath of that invasion.
In 1917 Alice Askew was working in the Serbian Red Cross hospital in Corfu, Greece. She was returning to the island with Claude after a short trip to Italy when, on 6 October, the ship that they were travelling on was torpedoed by a German submarine. Both would subsequently drown and, whilst Claude's body was never recovered, Alice's body was later washed ashore on the Croatian coast close to the village of Karbuni, where she is buried.
The relatively early death of the Askews would curtail their writing career and, as authors, they have been largely forgotten, with many of their novels long out of print. Yet, at the height of their powers they were a formidable writing team and, as one contemporary comment noted:
There are few readers of popular periodicals who do not know the names of these novelists, for the stories written by Alice and Claude Askew in collaboration have enjoyed a wide popularity, and it is fairly safe to say that few serial writers have so firm a hold upon the fiction-loving public.[1]
View A Daughter of Art by Alice and Claude Askew
View Behind Shuttered Windows by Alice and Claude Askew
View In Strange Shoes by Alice and Claude Askew
View Not Proven by Alice and Claude Askew
View Outlaw Jess by Alice and Claude Askew
View The House of the Black Panther by Alice and Claude Askew
View The Sealed Tower by Alice and Claude Askew