Margaret Storm Jameson was born into a Whitby ship building family in 1891. Her father was a ship’s captain and as a tiny child she accompanied her parents on sea voyages, claiming as one of her earliest memories a quay in Antwerp. This pre-school travel, and a passion for foreign places inherited from her mother, may have contributed to Jameson's lifelong hatred of settled life and domestic roots.

Encouraged by her mother she went to school in Whitby and then Scarborough, and in 1912 was the first woman to graduate with a first in English at Leeds, and one of only a dozen female students at Kings College London, where she completed her Leeds MA thesis on modern European drama. She helped set up the Eikonoklasts, a discussion group she described as “sceptics, unavowed anarchists, self-dedicated to the unmasking of hypocrites” and enjoyed the London intellectual world, first as a scholar, then a copywriter, essayist and later as the London scout of US publisher Alfred A. Knopf. She depicts the period in the recollections of Hervey Russell, Jameson's autobiographical “shadow”, in her Mirror in Darkness novel trilogy (1934-1936).

Jameson was at the height of her popularity between the wars and during the Secong World War, as a novelist but also as an activist well connected in left-wing circles. Campaigning against fascism she travelled widely in Europe before the War, being particularly influenced by her meetings with Czech and Hungarian writers and leaders in the late 30s. As President of the English Centre of International PEN from 1938-1944, Jameson helped intellectuals escape from Nazi-occupied countries, and sponsored groups of refugee writers, work which began her lifelong interest in themes of exile. She was placed on a Nazi blacklist to be arrested if there was an invasion. When invited to write the introduction to the first English edition of Anne Frank's diary, she stated it was “worth more to the world than all my industrious labour as a novelist.”

She lived for a year in Pittsburgh, six years in Ilkley, spent long holidays France and after thirty novels, numerous tracts and scholarly articles received a brief revival in attention in 1969 following the publication of her two-volume memoir, Journey from the North, some of her inter-war fiction being republished by Virago. Tellingly in letters written in her late eighties, she refers to Journey to the North, rather than from.

Jameson left the region but never settled, moving house almost compulsively, always seeing herself as rooted in the Whitby of her childhood. In her autobiographical writing she constantly refers to Yorkshire characteristics that defined her engagement with the world. She wrote in Company Parade how Hervey Russell “ walked quickly, until she came to the top of the moor … it ran north-east to the coast with its scanty villages and hard-set iron works. The valleys were like deep troughs of waves with the hill ahead rising in a great sweep as green as a wave to the other moors. ‘You’re a beauty you are.’ She said. I ought to be glad to stay here, she thought, but she was not. She wanted to go back to London, a city which in other ways she hated, because she had there the sense of things happening round her and within reach of her mind. In the moment that her heart lifted to the sight of Danesacre on a clear morning, she thought, I am buried alive here, I hear and know nothing. Yet she thought, I shall always come back.” Storm Jameson died in 1986.