Ursula Joyce Torday was born on February 19, 1912, in London, England. She was the daughter of mixed parentage, with her father, Emil Torday, being a Hungarian anthropologist and her mother, Gaia Rose MacDonald, being Scottish. Torday was educated at Kensington High School in London before attending Oxford University, where she obtained a BA in English at Lady Margaret Hall College. She later earned a Social Science Certificate at the London School of Economics.\n \n Torday's writing career began in the 1930s when she published her first three novels under her real name. During World War II, she worked as a probation officer for the Citizen's Advice Bureau. In the years following the war, Torday ran a refugee scheme for Jewish children, an experience that would later inspire several of her novels, including "The Briar Patch" (aka "Young Lucifer") and "The Children" (aka "Wednesday's Children") as Charity Blackstock. She also worked as a typist at the National Central Library in London, an experience that would inspire her future novel "Dewey Death" as Charity Blackstock. Additionally, Torday taught English to adult students.\n \n Torday returned to publishing in the early 1950s, using the pseudonyms Paula Allardyce, Charity Blackstock (in some cases reedited as Lee Blackstock in USA), and Charlotte Keppel to sign her gothic romance and mystery novels. Her novel "Miss Fenny" (aka "The Woman in the Woods") as Charity or Lee Blackstock was nominated for an Edgar Award. In 1961, her novel "Witches' Sabbath" won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association. Torday passed away in 1997.