PD James, the crime writer, who was born on August 3 1920 7.59 am Oxford and died six years ago, was an understated Leo with her Sun Neptune conjunction in Leo and Venus Jupiter in Leo all in her hidden 12th house. What marks her chart out as suited to a walk on the dark side strewn with corpses and murder is a creative, private and ferocious Water Grand Trine of Mars North Node in intense and dark Scorpio trine Pluto trine Uranus, formed into a Kite by Uranus opposition Saturn. She was talented but harboured a fair number of demons though she possibly never admitted that even to herself.
She had a tricky childhood with her mother in a mental hospital by the time she was in her mid-teens, leaving her to bring up two younger siblings. Married at 21 to an army doctor, she found herself as the breadwinner when he returned from the war suffering from a mental breakdown, which eventually sent him to a psychiatric hospital. In a rare moment of openness she once said she had been exceptionally scared of him when he became unwell and he died young, perhaps from suicide. She never remarried but brought up her two daughters and eventually had five grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.
Her first novel was published when she was 42 but she worked full time in the civil service, hospital administration and the forensic sciences before retiring at 60 to write full time. Latterly she became one of the great and the good, being a member of the House of Lords and sitting on endless committees, literary and otherwise.
In many ways her novels are more genteel than her chart, mainly upper-class perpetrators who strayed from the straight and narrow by circumstance rather than sadistic serial killers leaving a trail of blood and carnage behind them. She clearly leant on her Leo planets for her character and plots.
Though her chart is most similar to Patricia Cornwell who has a ruthless Mars opposition Pluto square Saturn.
James’ creative 5th harmonic is well aspected though strained. Her 21st writers’ harmonic is also notable. Even more so is her ‘serial killers’ 18H – so the understated cruelty in her books was maybe more a generational factor than an innate tendency. She wrote what she though the market would accept.