Born in 1897, in All Saints' Vicarage in Froxfield, Wiltshire, Constance Winifred Savery was the daughter of the Rev. John Manly Savery, and his wife, Constance Eleanor Harbord Savery. She was the eldest of five girls. When she was nine years old, her father exchanged livings with a Birmingham vicar and the family moved. So, after a country childhood, she spent her girlhood in a manufacturing district among black factory chimneys.
She was educated at King Edward's High School for Girls and then went to Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied English, and was in the first cohort of woman students to be granted degrees, in 1920. At Oxford, she knew Vera Brittain, Viola Garvin, Margaret Kennedy and Winifred Holtby. The first three were senior to her, but Winifrid Holtby was in her class. She earned a Post-Graduate Diploma in Secondary Education from Birmingham University, and M.A. from Oxford in 1927, and taught briefly (and unhappily), before her mother's death necessitated a return to her father's household in Middleton-cum-Fordley, Suffolk, where she helped him with the East Anglican parish work.
She never returned to teaching, instead earning her living from then on by writing. Even during WWII, when her home was in an area that was under fire for a long period, she managed to go on with her writing as well as caring for evacuated children and her own family. The conditions which she pictures with such realities and humor in Enemy Brothers she knew from personal experience.
Constancy Savery is the author of Pippin's House and Moonshine in Candle Street as well as a number of short stories which have appeared in American magazines. She published close to fifty books, and numerous short stories and articles, all informed by her deep Christian (Anglican) faith. She died in 1999.
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