AustLit

Daughter of Scottish father Peter Clouston and Anglo-German mother Marie (Ferrars) MacTaggart, Morna was educated at Bedale and graduated with a diploma in journalism from the University College, London in 1928. She started writing, she said, at the age of six (quoted in her obituary, The Times 3 April 1995), and published her first novels under her maiden name in the 1930s. After her second marriage, to plant physiologist Robert Brown in 1940, she embarked on a career of writing crime fiction. She published prolifically, both in the UK as 'Elizabeth Ferrars' and in America, where publishers insisted on a second initial, as 'Elizabeth X.Ferrars'. She lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, but must have visited South Australia on at least one occasion. Details of her visit(s) are not known.