Dorothy Kathleen Broster was born on 2nd September, 1877. She was a British novelist and short-story writer, born in Garston, Liverpool on the Lancashire coast.

Educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College and St. Hilda's College, Oxford (where she was one of the first students), she served as a Red Cross nurse during World War I with a voluntary Franco-American hospital. Following the war she returned to Oxford where she worked as a secretary to the Regius Professor of history and senior civil servants.

She produced her best-seller, The Flight of the Heron, in 1925, and followed it up with two successful sequels, The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile. She wrote several other historical novels, successful and much reprinted in their day, although the Jacobite Trilogy, featuring the dashing hero Ewen Cameron, remain the best known.

Broster's writing career spanned the period from just before World War I until just after World War II, and this turbulent period of uncertainty and conflict may well have influenced the attitudes encoded in her work.

Her books, most of them historical romances set during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period or the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and its aftermath, were very popular. Though not specifically written for adolescents they attracted a wide reading public including many young readers, and her most famous book, The Flight of the Heron (1925), was produced by BBC Scotland in 1976 as a six-part television serial and broadcast at a time suitable for children's viewing. She died on 7th February 1950.