CH
published with Mills and Boon
(who became her regular publisher) her first novel to reach book form, Crump Folk Going Home, dedicated to her father
and mother
.
Holme, Constance. Crump Folk Going Home. Cedric Chivers.
prelims
Education
J. K. Rowling
Formative early reading included Richard Scarry
and Kenneth Grahame
's The Wind in the Willows. Joanne Rowling did not care for Enid Blyton
as a young child but acquired a taste for her later...
Education
Alison Fell
AF
later remembered her childhood, at home, as full of beatings and beltings. This made her into a fanatic for justice and equality, though she felt it might equally easily have produced a working-class fascist...
Family and Intimate relationships
Fay Weldon
In addition, she says, to coming from the kind of dysfunctional background she could relate to, he was well-read, artistic, bohemian,
Weldon, Fay. Auto da Fay. Flamingo.
339
a house-owner, and a now-single parent. They walked together under a full moon...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Oakley
This is the first of AO
's novels without a central female protagonist; and the result is a certain lack of focus. The story is set at a resort on the coast of Turkey...
Literary responses
E. M. Hull
EMH
's first novel, her desert romance The Sheik, became something of a cultural phenomenon.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
It established the formula for the desert romance, which grew in popularity between the two World Wars in a...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jolley
Readers were often highly critical of Palomino.
Gilbert, Pam. Coming Out From Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers. Pandora.
44
The plot has been called terrible and often ridiculous rather than absurd.
Daniel, Helen. Liars: Australian New Novelists. Penguin.
276
Such uneasiness may be attributed in part to the unflinching seriousness with which...
Publishing
Rose Allatini
Her title deliberately misquotes from W. E. Henley
's I was a king in Babylon / And you were a Christian slave. Her dedicatees were both occultists and medical practitioners who ran a kind of...
Publishing
May Edginton
These two worked together again on a play entitled Secrets. ME
's Times obituary says that this was produced in 1922 at the Comedy Theatre
, where it ran for 373 performances starring Fay Compton
Publishing
Constance Holme
CH
published her second novel, The Lonely Plough, which became her best-known.
She wrote it secretly under the bedclothes, to combat boredom when, as a schoolgirl, she was sent home and kept in bed with something that was incorrectly suspected to be tuberculosis. Published by Mills and Boon
Publishing
Jean Plaidy
From this year until 1962, JP
published some thirty romance novels as Eleanor Alice Burford; she generally brought out at least one title a year, and sometimes two. Jenkins
published the novels until 1956...
Reception
Georgette Heyer
GH
later called her second novel, The Great Roxhythe. (published with Hutchinson
in 1922 and set late in the reign of Charles II
), the worst book I ever wrote—the sort of book that makes...
Textual Production
Rose Allatini
RA
published with her name as R. Allatini, through Mills and Boon
, her first novel, ". . . Happy Ever After".
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Textual Production
Beatrice Harraden
BH
's final novel, Search Will Find It Out, appeared from another new publisher, Mills and Boon
. It is titled from a line by Robert Herrick
, duly quoted on its title-page.
Harraden, Beatrice. Search Will Find It Out. Mills and Boon.
prelims, title-page
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Timeline
28 November 1908: Gerald Mills and Charles Boon registered...
Writing climate item
28 November 1908
Gerald Mills
and Charles Boon
registered their new publishing company, Mills and Boon
(then a general publisher of fiction and non-fiction), at an address in Whitcombe Street, London.
1930: The publisher Mills and Boon began specialising...
Writing climate item
1930
The publisher Mills and Boon
began specialising in romantic titles designed to sell to commercial libraries.
1971: The British firm of Mills and Boon, publishers...
Women writers item
1971
The British firm of Mills and Boon
, publishers of popular romance, were taken over by the North American Harlequin Books
.
9 December 2003: The UK's first toll motorway, the M6 Toll...
Building item
9 December 2003
The UK's first toll motorway, the M6 Toll Road, officially opened. The 27-mile stretch of road (formerly known as the Birmingham Northern Relief Road) was designed to give motorists the chance to avoid congestion...
20 April 2011: Jean MacLeod, Scottish author of a hundred...
Women writers item
20 April 2011
Jean MacLeod
, Scottish author of a hundred and thirty romantic novels published by Mills and Boon
, died at the age of one hundred and three.
“Obituaries. Jean MacLeod”. Daily Telegraph, p. 29.
29
December 2016: The one-hundredth romance novel by Mills...
Women writers item
December 2016
The one-hundredth romance novel by Mills and Boon
author Sharon Kendrick
, A Royal Vow of Convenience, was released not only in audio as well as book form but in a 3D sound recording.