Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2012) was a writer and literary critic. She joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force at eighteen and was initially stationed at RAF Thornaby before being sent to work on decoding German transcriptions at Bletchley Park as an intelligence officer between 1942 to 1945. She met Rodney Ian Shirley Bax (1920-1983) at Bletchley: they were married in 1944 and divorced in 1948. After the war, she read English at Somerville College, Oxford, and graduated in 1949 with a second-class degree. In 1948, whilst still a student at Oxford, she married Jerzy Pietrkiewicz (1916-2007), a Polish poet and novelist (they divorced in 1975). Brooke-Rose then studied for a PhD in medieval literature at University College, London, which she obtained in 1954. Unable to secure an academic position, she began to write full-time and published Gold, a long poem based on the late fourteenth-century dream-vision poem Pearl, in 1954. Her first novel, The Languages of Love, was published in 1957 but it was the publication of Out in 1964 which cemented her place as an experimental writer. In 1966, she won the James Tait Black memorial prize for fiction for Such. Brooke-Rose moved to France in 1968 and began her scholarly career at the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes. She was appointed professor of English and American literature and literary theory there in 1975 and established her name as a literary critic. She married Claude Brooke in 1981 (divorced 1982) and retired to Provence in 1988. She died on 21 March 2012.

For full biographical details, see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.