Honor Renée Minturn Croome (6 July 1908 - 29 September 1960) was an English writer.
Life
Honor Croome was born on 6 July 1908 as Honoria Renée Minturn Scott in Sevenoaks, Kent. Her father Arthur Hugh Scott was a schoolmaster and her mother Mildred Minturn Scott was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, where she became a close friend of Frances Fincke, later wife of the famed judge Learned Hand. Mildred Minturn's translation of Jean Jaurès's Studies in Socialism was published shortly before she married Arthur Scott in 1906.
Croome began her schooling at l’École de l’Île-de-France, a French boarding school run on the model of an English public school at which her father taught. She attended a girls' school in Switzerland (an experience she used as the basis for her novel, The Mountain and the Molehill), the Hayes Court School in Kent, Bryn Mawr College, the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally the London School of Economics. While at the LSE, she studied under Lionel Robbins and became acquainted with the work of Friedrich Hayek.
After graduating from the LSE, Croome wrote her first book, The Approach to Economics and assisted Nicholas Kaldor in the translation of Hayek's Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle into English. She then worked at the New Fabian Research Bureau, an organization involved in statistics and planning — probably the inspiration for the Housing Plan organization she later described in her second novel You’ve Gone Astray.
In 1930 she was sent to Egypt by her father "to forget about Lewis", this being John Lewis Croome (1907-2008), known as 'Lewis' and who had been a year ahead of her at the LSE. Despite her father's efforts they married in 1931, and in 1933, the couple purchased land in Claygate, Surrey on which they built their home, known as Pearmain. In 1935, Honor Croome became the political secretary to Nancy Astor, then Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton. She wrote in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin that the job was “tremendous fun” but also tiring: “I am rapidly going grey and can hear imaginary typewriters and telephones in my dreams.” A year later, she wrote that she left the post “owing to (a) nervous exhaustion and (b) incompetence” and “returned to the fleshpots and to society of son [John Croome] and heir aged 2½.” “Very nice, too,” she added.
Croome wrote articles and reviews for The New Statesman and Nation until 1937, when she became a regular contributor to The Spectator. She gave birth to a daughter, Ursula, in 1936 and wrote her classmates at Bryn Mawr that she was busy with a family “to cook for, a job to hold down, and a book to see through the press.” The book she referred to was The Economy of Britain: A History, published in 1938.
In July 1940, Croome sailed with son John and daughter Ursula to Canada. She gave birth to her son Gilbert soon after arrival. She and the children spent a year living as refugees in Westwood, Massachusetts outside Boston. In 1941, Lewis Croome was appointed as head of the British Food Mission to Canada and the family settled in Ottawa, where they remained until 1946. While in Ottawa, Honor Croome wrote her first two novels, O Western Wind and You've Gone Astray and gave birth to two more sons, David and Geoffrey.
The Croomes returned to England in April 1946 and Honor resumed her work as an economist and journalist while continuing to write and raise her children. She resumed her work as a reviewer and opinion writer for The Spectator, published her third novel, The Faithless Mirror in 1946 and began publishing articles on domestic matters in magazines such as Homes & Garden. She published two more novels in the 1950s: The Mountain and the Molehill (1955) and The Forgotten Place (1957). She also published three economics texts: The Candidate's Companion (1947); The Livelihood of Man (with Gordon King) (1953); and Introduction to Money (1956).
Croome did not believe that feminism was incompatible with domesticity. "A woman should have a proper appreciation of the extent to which family life was in itself a career," she once wrote. She also argued, however, that men should also take a hand in housekeeping: "Just possibly the compulsory Jill-of-all-trades, coming as best she can to terms with the feminist dilemma, may be learning an attitude to life which the masculine half of society could also, mutatis mutandis, adopt with profit."
