SALLY CARSON was born in 1902 in Surrey, England, and brought up and educated in Dorset. For several years she served as a publisher's reader, taught dance, and worked on an unpublished novel. During this time, she often went to stay in Bavaria with friends; it was first in Germany and then back in England that she wrote her trilogy of novels, Crooked Cross (1934), The Prisoner (1936), and A Traveller Came By (1938). Crooked Cross was performed as a play in Birmingham in 1935 and later in London. In 1938 she married Eric Humphries and gave birth to three children before dying of breast cancer in June of 1941.