Patricia Highsmith

Four of her ten planets sit in water signs, three in earth, two in air and a single one in fire. Water registers before it decides, and the element that would force a thing is nearly absent. Highsmith wrote Strangers on a Train and the Ripley novels, and the record says she published a lesbian love story under a pseudonym in 1952 that sold a million copies.

The Sun sits on the final degree of Capricorn and the Moon on the first twenty one minutes of Gemini, so both of the chart's most important placements sit within a degree of a boundary. Mercury sits on the first degree of Aquarius as well. Capricorn works to a plan and counts the cost; Gemini holds two accounts of one thing and will not choose. For a novelist who published one book under another name, a chart with its identity and its private half both at the edge of their signs is a fitting structure.

Venus, Mars and Uranus sit inside twelve degrees of Pisces, taste and drive gathered with the planet that refuses the expected arrangement. The Moon makes an easy skill of its contact with Neptune at under two fifths and easy contact with Mercury at three quarters. Four of the ten planets were retrograde, all of them from Jupiter outwards. In a writer, feeling on effortless terms with both image and speech is the equipment the work is made with.

She died at Locarno on 4 February 1995, at seventy four. Saturn rules her Capricorn Sun, and that day it stood conjunct her natal Mars at a quarter of a degree. Pluto stood directly opposite her natal Moon two hundredths of a degree from exact, the closest contact in that sky, and Uranus sat on her natal Sun within two degrees. The Moon was a crescent at twenty two per cent, the phase that pushes against the weight of how a thing has always been done.