Beatrice Chase (5 July 1874 – 3 July 1955) was the pen name for a British writer known during the first half of the 20th century for her Dartmoor-based novels. Her real name was Olive Katharine Parr, and she claimed to be directly descended from William Parr, the brother of Catherine, the sixth wife of Henry VIII. Biography Beatrice Chase was born as Olive Katherine Parr in Harrow on the Hill in 1874. Her father, Charles Parr, apparently died when she was young, and her mother was a lapsed Catholic. Both Olive and her younger sister Hilda were educated at the Convent of the Holy Child in Cavendish Square, and both were baptised Catholics and became Dominican Tertiaries. Olive also took the nun's vow of chastity. Around 1900 she was helping the poor in London, when she contracted a lung disease, and her younger sister died. In 1901 she travelled to Devon to convalesce and spent time with her mother in the Dartmoor village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor. By 1908 she and her mother had bought a farm at Venton about south-south-east of the village. She later wrote about the discovery of the property in a book A Book of Answered Prayers that she published as Olive Katherine Parr in 1915. They rented out the farm and its outbuildings, but retained a cottage in which they lived, and built an adjacent Roman Catholic chapel which was licensed as a public oratory by Dr. Charles Graham, the Bishop of Plymouth, and for which the sacrament was reserved in 1910 until it was universally withdrawn by the Vatican in 1920. Her first book The Voice of the River was published under her real name by Routledge in 1903. She used her real name for seven more books before starting to use her Beatrice Chase pseudonym with The Heart of the Moor, published by Herbert Jenkins in 1914. From then on she tended to use her real name only for her factual and religious writings. During the First World War, Chase formed a "Crusade for Moral Living" which attracted a large following. Soldiers in the trenches and their wives or fiancées at home would write to Chase at Venton, pledging to be "true to honour". In return, Chase prayed for their souls in her small chapel. She attempted to revive the crusade in World War Two, but had no success. She was often to be