When she was seventeen - in order to ease the strain on family finances - she decided to try to earn her own living, and went on the stage, performing in Sir Herbert Tree’s company, and later starring in Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back.

In 1914 she married John Fortescue, the King’s Librarian and Archivist and famous historian of the British Army. The marriage, in spite of a huge disparity of age between them, was a uniquely happy one, and although Winifred Fortescue gave up her career on the stage, she later began a successful interior decorating and dress designing business until illness forced her to close her company down. It was at that point that she began writing, for Punch, the Daily Chronicle, the Evening News, finally inaugurating and editing a Woman’s Page for the Morning Post.

In the early 1930s, John and Winifred Fortescue, now Sir John and Lady Fortescue, moved to Provence and there she wrote her famous and bestselling Perfume From Provence, and the sequel Sunset House. Perfume From Provence became a bestseller once again when it was re-published by Black Swan in 1992. Trampled Lilies continues her story of Provence during World War Two. Her autobiography, There’s Rosemary, There’s Rue, was first published in 1939. She died at Opio, Provence, in April 1951.