Dorothy Kathleen Broster (2 September 1877 – 7 February 1950), usually known as D. K. Broster, was an English novelist and short-story writer. Her fiction consists mainly of historical romances set in the 18th or early 19th centuries. Her best known novel is The Flight of the Heron (1925), set during the Jacobite rising of 1745. Broster's horror fiction stories depict haunted artists, psychic girls, haunted chairs, and supernatural entities tormenting living humans. In 2022, several of her weird fiction stories were reprinted in the collection From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907 - 1945
Broster avoided publicity during her lifetime. While she was an Englishwoman from Liverpool, many of her readers wrongly assumed that she was a male writer from Scotland.
Biography
Dorothy Kathleen Broster was born on 2 September 1877, to Thomas Mawdsley Broster and Emilie Kathleen Gething, at Devon Lodge (now Monksferry House) in Grassendale Park, Garston, Liverpool, on the banks of the Mersey. "And to this she probably owed her life-long interest in the sea." When she was 16, the family moved to Cheltenham, where she attended Cheltenham Ladies' College. From 1896 to 1898 she read history at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she was one of the first students, although at this date women were not awarded degrees.
Broster served as secretary to Charles Harding Firth, (Regius Professor of History from 1904 to 1925) for several years, and collaborated on several of his works. Her first two novels were co-written with a college friend, Gertrude Winifred Taylor: Chantemerle: A Romance of the Vendean War (1911) and The Vision Splendid (1913) (about the Tractarian Movement).
