Weekly Geeks #24

The rules are:
1. Choose a writer you like.
2. Using resources such as Wikipedia, the author’s website, whatever you can find, make a list of interesting facts about the author.
3. Post your fun facts list in your blog, maybe with a photo of the writer, a collage of his or her books, whatever you want.
4. Come sign the Mr Linky below with the url to your fun facts post.
5. As you run into (or deliberately seek out) other Weekly Geeks’ lists, add links to your post for authors you like or authors you think your readers are interested in.

I recently finished reading Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn, so I thought I might talk about her for this week’s Weekly Geeks. The following information comes from Wikipedia.

Holt was born Eleanor Alice Burford in London in 1906, and married George Percival Hibbert, a leather merchant, when she was in her twenties. Hibbert wrote most of her 200-plus novels under about seven or eight pen names, the most common of which was Jean Plaidy, for her historical novels. Victoria Holt was the name that Hibbert used for her novels of Gothic suspense. She died at sea, somewhere between Greece and Port Said, Egypt, in 1993.

Hibbert was greatly influenced by the great nineteenth century novelists—the Bronte sisters in particular (you can definitely see this if you read Mistress of Mellyn). She also admired the works of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy. Hibbert’s first novel was published in 1941 under her maiden name, and in 1945 she began using the name Jean Plaidy. As Victoria Holt, she published her first book under that name, Mistress of Mellyn, in 1960. Other names she used were Elbur Ford, Kathleen Kellow, Ellalice Tate, Anna Percival, and Philippa Carr. The reason why she used so many names was because she wrote books in so many genres, and wanted to keep them separate. Hibbert has often been called the “Queen of Romantic Suspense,” and more and more of her books are coming back into print.