Home > World War I > Helen Thomas Biography

July 11, 1877
Liverpool, England
April 12, 1967
Eastbury, England

Writer, memoirist

"It is a great trial to me to write to inform you that your husband was killed this morning… . He has been so much my support through this difficult—and to me, uncongenial —work, and he has been so wise and kind in the help he has given me."
—John Thorburn, in a letter to Helen Thomas dated April 9, 1917, relating the death of her husband, Edward Thomas, in battle; reprinted in Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Helen Thomas was the wife of Edward Thomas (1878– 1917), one of England's most prominent poets in the first decades of the twentieth century. She was emotionally dev astated when he died in combat in April 1917, and she turned to writing to deal with her grief. Her two-volume autobiogra phy, As It Was (1926) and World Without End (1931),...