Gerda Charles

Gerda Charles was the pseudonym of Edna Lipson, an award-winning Anglo-Jewish novelist and author. She was born in Liverpool and was daughter of Harold Lipson and Gertrude Caplan who had married in Ormskirk in 1914. At some point her parents' marriage ended as by 1939 Gertrude Lipson was classified as divorced in the electoral records. For some years in the 1930s Edna and her mother ran a commercial hotel at 81 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool. After the war they both moved to London and Edna began attending evening classes in literature and writing at Morley College.