Primarily a romantic novelist, Berta Ruck produced nearly eighty novels over the course of her writing career as well as large numbers of short stories. Her fiction focuses on young girls and love. She also produced an autobiography and four books of deliberately haphazard memoirs which pay loving tribute to
Wales. Her career spanned all but about three decades of the twentieth century, during most of which she published an average higher than a book a year.
Milestones
2 August 1878 Amy Roberta ('Berta') Ruck, the eldest of eight children, was born at
Murree in
Punjab,
India.
1905 BR's first story, about the life of an art student in
Paris, was entitled "Miss Grant's Preliminary Sketch"; it appeared in
The Idler (following some of her illustrations there).
May 1972 BR published
Ancestral Voices, last in her series of autobiographical novels set in
Wales, and the last publication of her long writing career.
