Catherine Storr (Author) Catherine Storr (1913-2001) was an English children's writer, best known for her novel Marianne Dreams and for the Clever Polly series. She was born in London, and attended St Paul's Girls' School, and went on to study English literature at Newnham College, Cambridge. She tried unsuccessfully to become a novelist but without giving up this ambition she studied medicine, qualifying as a doctor in 1944. She worked at the Middlesex Hospital. Afterwards, while regularly producing new children's books, she also worked as an editorial assistant for Penguin Books, from 1966 to the early seventies.She married in 1942 and in 1944 had the first of her three daughters. She divorced in 1970 and remarried the economist Lord Balogh (1905-1985).