Marie Joseph

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| name = Marie Joseph

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| pseudonym = Marie Joseph

| birth_name = Marie Hampton Downs

| birth_date = 21 May 1920[http://www.cottontown.org/Culture%20and%20Leisure/Literature/Pages/Marie-Joseph.aspx Cotton Town: Marie Joseph]

| birth_place = Blackburn, Lancashire, England

| death_date = 28 December 1996 (aged 76)[http://www.crimefictioniv.com/Part_24A.html Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography 1749-2000 – New Addenda #24]

| death_place = Harrow, London, England[https://search.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=7579&h=2977444&tid=&pid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=OzZ10315&_phstart=successSource Ancestry: Marie Hampton Joseph in the England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1916-2007]

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| occupation = Novelist

| language = English

| nationality = British

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| period = 1960s–1992

| genre = Romance

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| spouse = Frank Joseph (m. 1942)

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| children = 2 daughters

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| awards = RoNA Award

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Marie Hampton Joseph (née Downs, 21 May 1920 – 28 December 1996) was a British writer of short-stories in magazines, 16 romance novels and a book about her arthritis. In 1987, her novel A Better World Than won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.{{Citation|title=Awards by the Romantic Novelists' Association|url=http://www.romanticnovelistsassociation.org/index.php/awards|date=3 October 2012}}

Biography

=Personal life=

Joseph was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, England in May 1920 and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. She was in the Civil Service, before her marriage with a chartered Engineer. They had two daughters, now married, and eight grandchildren. She lived in Middlesex with her retired husband.{{Citation| author1 = Mandy Hicken | author2 = Raymond John Prytherch | title = Now Read On... A guide to contemporary popular fiction | publisher = Scolar Press | pages = 442 | year = 1994}}

=Career=

She started to write at the age of 40, and she managed to publish in journals during the 1960s and 1970s, the stories are reedited in collection in the 1990s. Joseph published her first long romance novel in 1975. In 1976, she wrote a book about her life with arthritis. She continued publishing romance novels until 1992 and died in Harrow, London in December 1996 at the age of 76.