Bell, Josephine

Josephine Bell is the pseudonym of the British writer and physician Doris Bell Ball, the author of radio plays, serials, a large number of short stories, one work of non-fiction as well as sixty-four novels, forty-five of which were detective novels or thrillers. She was born in Manchester as Doris Bell Collier. Bell's father, a doctor, died when she was seven. Her mother remarried a couple of years later, but Doris did not get on with her step father, and is reported to have been relieved to have been sent off to the Godolphin School, a boarding school in Salisbury in 1910. In 1916, she enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge. She took her degrees in medicine at University College Hospital, London, in 1922 and 1924.