Hélène Barcynska

HB was a prolific popular novelist of the twentieth century, who had her greatest successes before and after the First World War and was still publishing after the second. Her autobiography, issued in 1941, lists thirty-eight novels she issued as Oliver Sandys (plus six films) and twenty-one she issued as Countess Barcynska (five filmed). Her stories show inventiveness (as well as borrowing from life) and ingenuity. Her total output of novels may be a hundred and thirty, but library catalogues do not capture all the likely attributions. She also published short stories, further memoirs (one of them an account of mystical or faith-healing experience), and a biography of her second husband.