My mother, Shirley Harrison, who has died aged 91, was an enthusiastic and empathetic journalist and writer. Without formal academic training, Shirley had a rare ability to write in an accessible but always well-informed and well-researched way.

In the 1990s she became embroiled in unexpected controversy after writing a book about the apparent diary of Jack the Ripper. Shirley had been handed the facsimile of the alleged diary by her agent, and commissioned to both authenticate it and write a narrative commentary. Published in 1993, the book was an international bestseller, but attacks from sceptics led to the US publisher pulping its copies before release, and the Sunday Times pulling out of its serialisation. Shirley was always open to new evidence, but remained convinced of the diary’s authenticity and was frustrated by the vitriol she received in relation to it.

Although The Diary of Jack the Ripper received the most attention, Shirley wrote many other well-received books, on wide-ranging topics that seized her imagination. Discovering that the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst had lived near her childhood home led to Shirley writing the first authorised biography, with the Pankhurst family providing access to previously unpublished documents. Having raised her children in the village that was home to Winnie-the-Pooh, Shirley wrote a “biography” of the bear that had inspired AA Milne’s stories.

Born in Woodford Green, in what was then Essex, to Elsie (nee Sheffield) and Leonard Williamson, who worked for the water board, Shirley went to Woodford county high school. University was not seen as an option for her, and she started work on the Walthamstow Guardian as a junior reporter. She later entered public relations, setting up her own agency in the 50s.

She met and married John Harrison, a patent agent, in 1958. Before their children were born, John and Shirley travelled to Mali, living in a Dogon village at a time when European visitors were still rare, and writing an (unpublished) book documenting daily life there.

In the 60s the family moved to Hartfield in rural Sussex, to a derelict Tudor gatehouse that they turned into a smallholding – complete with 20 sheep. Now with four children, Shirley stopped writing briefly, but soon returned to journalism via the local newspaper.

A series of travel guides with John was followed by Shirley’s first single-authored book, Who Was Father Christmas? (1981). After John’s death from cancer in 1982, and having published two more books, A Taste of Cider (1982) and The Channel (1986), Shirley wrote New Approaches to Cancer (1987). This was followed by Cults: The Battle for God (1990), then the book on the Ripper diary, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Maverick Life (2004), and The Life and Times of Winnie-the-Pooh (2011). She also wrote historical accounts of Southwark in London and Rochester, Kent.

In 1997 Shirley married Duncan Field, a chartered surveyor and estate agent. He died in 2023.

She is survived by her children, Kate, Alex, Gavin and me, five grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and two sisters, Penny and Sue.