Collection: Catherine Storr

Catherine Storr (1913–2001) was born Catherine Cole and brought up in Kensington, London. A talented organist, she studied with Gustav Holst at St Paul’s Girls’ School. She graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, with a degree in English literature and went on to study medicine. She began practicing as a psychiatrist in 1944 and worked at Middlesex Hospital in the 1950s and ’60s before becoming an editor at Penguin in 1966. She published her first book, Ingeborg and Ruthy, in 1940, and married Anthony Storr, a fellow psychiatrist, in 1942. They had three daughters: Sophia, Emma, and Polly—for whom she wrote Polly and the Wolf and its sequels. In addition to her stories about Polly and the Wolf, she went on to write some one hundred books for young readers and adults, including Marianne Dreams, Marianne and Mark, Lucy, and Tales from a Psychiatrist’s Couch. About her work, she once remarked, “I don’t write with a child readership in mind, I write for the childish side of myself.”