Cecily Mackworth was born in Monmouthshire in 1911, to a Welsh military family. She studied journalism at the London School of Economics. She spent time in Hungary and Germany, witnessing the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, before settling in Paris in 1936. Forced to flee Paris in 1940, she worked briefly for the Free French in London during the war. Her first major writing success detailed her escape from the Nazi advance, I Came out of France (1941). After the war she wrote studies on the poets Francois Villon (1947) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1967). She was one of two female journalists working in Palestine at the time of the birth of Israel, and published a book about the experience, The Mouth of the Sword, in 1949. Her book, The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt, was published in 1954. She published two novels, Spring's Green Shadow (1952) and Lucy's Nose (1992), and two volumes of autobiography, Ends of the World (1987) and Out of the Black Mountains, the latter completed weeks before her death in 2006.