page_title: Ruby Ferguson
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Ruby Ferguson / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: The town of Reeth in North Yorkshire, England, seen from Fremington Edge
context_page_description: Ruby Constance Annie Ferguson, was a British writer of popular fiction, including children's books, romances, and mysteries. She is best known today for her Jill books, a series of Pullein-Thompsonesque pony books for children and young adults.
context_section_description: Ferguson was born in Hebden Bridge and raised in Reeth, North Yorkshire. Her father was the Reverend David Ashby, a Wesleyan minister, and Ferguson herself later became a lay officer of the Methodist church. She received her education at Bradford Girls Grammar School and then at St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford, where she read English from 1919 to 1922, gaining a normal BA and, a few years later, the Oxford MA.
  She then moved to Manchester and took a job as a secretary, supplementing her income by writing a regular column for the British Weekly, and by reading and reviewing books for a publisher.  Her writing career began in earnest when she submitted some detective stories to a weekly competition in the Manchester Evening News. Her first full-length novel appeared in 1926, and she continued writing novels and stories under the name "R.C. Ashby" until the mid-1930s.
  In 1934, she married Samuel Ferguson, a widower with two sons. Three years later, she published Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary, a romantic novel that proved very popular. Between 1949 and 1962 she attained her greatest success when she wrote the "Jill" books for her step-grandchildren, Libs, Sallie, and Pip. Her last book, Children at the Shop, is a fictionalised memoir of her childhood.
caption: Reeth, North Yorkshire, Ferguson's hometown
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