Ruby Constance Annie Ferguson, née Ashby (28 July 1899 – 11 November 1966), was an English writer of popular fiction, including children's literature, romances and mysteries as R. C. Ashby and Ruby Fergunson. She is best known today for her novel Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary and her Jill books, a series of Pullein-Thompsonesque pony books for children and young adults. Life and career Ruby Constance Annie Ashby was born in Hebden Bridge and raised in Reeth, North Yorkshire. Her father was the Reverend David Ashby, a Wesleyan minister, and Ferguson herself later became a lay officer of the Methodist church. She received her education at Bradford Girls Grammar School and then at St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford, where she read English from 1919 to 1922, gaining a normal BA and, a few years later, the Oxford MA. She then moved to Manchester and took a job as a secretary, supplementing her income by writing a regular column for the British Weekly, and by reading and reviewing books for a publisher. Her writing career began in earnest when she submitted some detective stories for a weekly competition in the Manchester Evening News. Her first full-length novel appeared in 1926. She continued writing novels and stories under the name "R.C. Ashby" until the mid-1930s. In 1934, she married Samuel Ferguson, a widower with two sons. Three years later, she published Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary as Ruby Ferguson, a romantic novel that became her greatest success, which was republished in 2004 by Persephone Books. On its original publication, The Queen Mother is reported to have enjoyed the book so much that she invited Ruby Ferguson to dinner at Buckingham Palace. The new edition also received favourable notices – in fact, it was listed as one of the "Books of the Year" by The Spectator. Between 1949 and 1962 she gained great popularity with the "Jill" books for her step-grandchildren, Libs, Sallie, and Pip. Her last book, Children at the Shop, is a fictionalised memoir of her childhood. Aside from the Jill series, most of Ferguson's books are long out of print and have become somewhat rare. The Jill books The Jill books are a series of nine children's novels about young equestrienne Jill Crewe and her adventures with her two ponies, Black Boy and Rapide. In recent editions, small changes were made to the background details to make