Kathleen Winsor was born in Amsterdam, Holland, and educated at the Royal Academy of Music. She became a professional opera singer and sang with leading European opera companies for over thirty years. In the 1960s she discovered that her voice had steadily deteriorated from a career-ending injury to her vocal cords. In 1968 she began to write in an effort to overcome her own sense of isolation and loneliness
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Her first book, Auntie Mame, was published in 1970. When it became a bestseller she began writing full time. She sold the film rights to an adaptation of her next novel, The Women in White (1980), but the movie never materialized; later the novel was made into a film in 2000 by Disney Studios under the direction of Robert Altman.
Her other novels include Devil's Island (1975), The Young Don't Cry (1978), The Secret (1982), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1984), The White Witch (1986), A House for Mr. Biswas (1987), The Golden Bowl (1989) and Sarah's Story (1995).