Stockley, Philippa

Having had her first novel rejected by Faber when she was eight, Philippa Stockley worked variously and often simultaneously as a painter; a clothing-, set-, costume-, interior- and graphic-designer; a window-painter; journalist; newspaper-page-designer; editor, columnist and reviewer, before publishing her first London-set novel, "The Edge of Pleasure".She studied English at Oxford, then clothing history at the Courtauld Institute where she wrote a thesis upon costume in the novels of Fielding and Defoe, giving her an introduction to the background of her second novel, "The Factory of Cunning...