Malachi Whitaker was the pseudonym of Marjorie Whitaker, born Olive Marjorie Taylor, the eighth of eleven children, in Bradford in 1895. She left school at the age of thirteen to help support her family, and married Leonard Whitaker in 1917. She began publishing short stories soon after and four collections were published by Jonathan Cape between 1929 and 1934. She came to be considered one of the finest English short story writers of her time. As she writes in And So Did I, by the late 1930s, she found writing increasingly problematic and she published few new pieces thereafter. She died in Skipton, Yorkshire, in 1976.