Carola Oman (Lady Lenanton) was born and brought up at Oxford, where her father, Sir Charles Oman, was Chichele Professor of Modern History.
She went to Wychwood School when she was seven, and was already writing poems and stories which she illustrated herself, and later wrote historical plays at school. She served as a nurse with the British Red Cross Society on the Western front during WWI from 1916 until 1919. Her first book, a volume of poems, was published in 1921. The following year she married Sir Gerald Lenanton and lived in London. Then she and her husband went to live in Hertfordshire in an old house that was built in the year that Charles I was born.
While in London, Carola Oman would write historical and modern novels; in the country she would write historical biographies and books for children. Known as a versatile and talented author and writer of historical biography, she was particularly noted for her Horatio Nelson, for which she was awarded the Sunday times British Literature Prize in 1948 followed by the James Tait Memorial Prize for a biography of Sir John Moore in 1953.
She once had three spotted dogs called after the Plantagenet kings—Edward, Richard, and John—and a black Labrador called Prince Rupert.
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