Gladys Aylward

Gladys May Aylward was a British evangelical Christian missionary to China, whose story was told in the book The Small Woman, by Alan Burgess, published in 1957, and made into the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman, in 1958. The movie was produced by Twentieth Century Fox, and filmed entirely in North Wales and England.

Aylward was born to a workingclass family in Edmonton, North London, in 1902. Her parents were Thomas John Aylward and Rosina Florence Aylward . Her siblings were Laurence and Violet. She worked as a domestic worker at an early age but always had an ambition to go overseas as a missionary and studied with great determination to be fitted for the role, only to be turned down because her academic background was inadequate, and the China Inland Mission to which she applied was convinced that it was not possible to learn the language at her age.

Source: Wikipedia