reviews_and_ramblings | Mary Burchell (1904

Ida Cook was born on 1904 at 37 Croft Avenue, Sunderland, England. With her old sister Mary Louise Cook (1901), she attending the Duchess' School in Alnwick. Later the sisters took civil service jobs in London, and developed a passionate interest in opera.

A constant presence at Covent Garden, the pair became close to some of the greatest singers of the era; Amelia Galli-Curci, Rosa Ponselle, Tito Gobbi and Maria Callas. They also came to know the Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss, and it was through he that Cooks learned of the persecution of European Jews. In 1934, Krauss's wife asked the sisters to help a friend to leave Germany. Having accomplished this, the sisters continued the good work, pretending to be eccentric opera fanatics willing to go anywhere to hear a favourite artist. Krauss assisted them, even arranging to perform in cities they needed to visit. The sisters made repeated trips to Germany, bringing back jewellery and valuables belonging to Jewish families. This enabled Jews to satisfy British requirements as regards financial security - Jews were not allowed to leave Germany with their money. Using many techniques of evasion, including re-labelling furs with London labels, the sisters enabled 29 persons to escape from almost certain death.

The Cooks' own finances were little precarious, and Ida worked as a sub-editor on Mab's Fashions in Fleet Street, and wrote short stories, followed by her first stab at a romantic serial, and then obtained a contract with Mills and Boon to published her first novel in 1936, when she left the Civil Service to write full time.

"I am I think by nature a tale-spinner, and passionately interested in people," Burchell recalled. "The thing that I found I was capable of doing was romancing - rather strongly for my period."

As Mary Burchell, she became a prolific writer of romantic fiction. Her great popularity helped the success of Mills and Boon, and guaranteed substantial income after the war. For many decades, her writing supported her two passions: refugees and young opera singers. Her flat in Dolphin Square at various times housed homeless European families.

When Charles Boon handed Burchell her first, three-book contract, she was eager to sign on the spot:

"No, no!" he said firmly. "You must never sign anything like that. You take that ontract home and show it to your father, and if he says you can sign it, you can."

How's that for the wicked old world of publishing? No wonder I knew from that moment I was in safe hands."

Her debut, Wife to Christopher (1936), was a lively tale of two sisters, one of whom is compromised into marriage, which in the end is transformed into love. Burchell regarded romance novels as an excellent escape from reality, which certainly was true for readers during the Second World War.

"Of course we all like make-believe, particularly when things are not going awfully well, naturally," she said. "Charles Boon, certainly, and Alan I think as well, were prepared to publish whatever I wrote. And so they must have believed in me. And then of course I was completely spoiled."

During her first ten years with the firm, Burchell wrote thirty-six novels.

Mills & Boon anticipated a major publishing boom after the war. From 1944 Joseph Henley, who ran the firm, signed a number of new contracts with several authors, including the most prolific ones, like Jan Tempest and Mary Burchell. Tempest's 1944 contract, for example, covered 12 books, to be published between July 1944 and June 1947, with a quarterly payment of £50 paid as her advance. Burchell's 12-book contract had even better terms: £90 paid per quarter.

A 1949 ad illustrated Mary Burchell's staying power: 406.473 copies of Mary Burchell's books have been sold, mostly to the Library Trade. On average each book is lent 100 times at 3d. a time, thus earning 25s.25s. x 406.473 - £508.091 5s., not a bad figure for one author. By 1949 Burchell had published 41 novels, starting in 1936; according to this information, each could have sold (with reprintings) an average of 10.000 copies, and so (at 100 lendings per copy) could have been read by as many as one million people.

Mary Burchell, as other Mills & Boon's authors, believed that romance was escapism.

"The girl's reactions are basically your own, unless you're doing it as a business," she recalled. "You cannot really, in my view, write a good romance where the girl, who is of course the person (through) whose eyes you see it, has reactions that are basically not your own. I think this is almost always the case."

"Mary Burchell wasn't sexy, but she showed an awareness of it," Alan Boon explained. "I always thought that Mary Burchell's books, and Sara Seale's, in the early days had the most sex in their books. But it was a pretended form of sex, not suggestive in any way at all. It was instinct, not partiipating."

Romance in the Mills & Boon novels in the 1930s took many forms. While the overall intention was, as Alan Boon has noted, "wholesomeness", authors tried, within the limits implied by "wholesomeness", to make their storylines as erotic as possible. A common scene, usually at the beginning of the novel, was the moment when the heroine sense an unmistakable attraction to the hero. "Electricity" was often in the air. For example, in Mary Burchell's debut, Wife to Christopher (1936), Vicky senses the "spark" on seeing Christopher for the first time:

It is the simplest and most primitive way to the meeting of two spirits. Independent of sight, it is a spark that even a blind person can strike. Wordless, it can spring to life between people who know no word of each other's language. And, like all things primitive, it is inexplicable, instinctive - and passionately exciting.

In novels at this time "lovemaking" referred almost exclusively to kissing between married hero and heroine. Pre- and extra-marital affairs were naturally discouraged and, if attempted, brought wicked consequences to the hero and heroine. Mills & Boon authors (and, indirectly, Charles Boon) appear to have been issuing life lessons all the time to potential readers.

"I truly don't think I have ever let a girl of mine do anything that I wouldn't like to see a girl of that age do, or if she does, she's punished," Mary Burchell said.

In Mary Burchell's Wife to Christopher, Christopher, compromised into marriage by Vicki, rapes her, "collecting" her beauty which she sold him, like "any street girl":

He bent his head and kissed her deliberately and insultingly.

"I'm going to collect what you sold, Vicki. And I'm not at all sure that it won't be rather sweet doing it."

"No!" She made another quick movement, but he put both his arms round her and held her still. And as she lay there in his arms, staring fascinatedly up at him, he suddenly showered kisses on her: on her angry, bruised mouth, on the little hollow at the base of her throat, and lower, where the warm whiteness of her skin showed through the lace of her nightdress.

The he swung her clear off her feet. With an abrupt movement of his shoulder he knocked out the electric light, and as he did so, darkness seemed to swing down on her like a stifling curtain.

Vicki awakens the next morning in "sweet ecstasy", noting, "if he came with something of the terror of an avenger, he came with the glory of a lover, too". Vicki learns she is pregnant, but the child is stillborn - perhaps a condemnation of the violence, and of her duplicity. Burchell's novel, her debut, was hardly the typical boy-meets-girl romance, but Burchell got away with it, as it was a best-seller. "I think Alan probably knew, as did his father, that a little early on I was already, without knowing it, exploiting a rather bolder form of romantic novel." Burchell said.

Since most of the women who wrote for Mills & Boon during the 1930s were young, they were likely to be fairly closely in touch with their potential readers and in tune with changes in style. They were certainly sympathetic, for instance, to the single working life and the concerns about money, finding a husband, and starting a family. Especially the first.

"You will notice in all the books in those early days the troubles which the girls have almost always stem from little money around," Mary Burchell recalled. "These girls have immense temptation to fritter; it's an age of frittering of course. The fear of not being able to make your own way was a very, very strong one indeed."

Mary Burchell continued to write what came to be known as "family stories". She was appalled by the sexier trend on display at a Romantic Times conference in New York City in the 1980s:

The rather dreadful young woman who ran it, came over first and interviewed me. She asked the most idiotic questions, like, "Do you believe in sustained sensuality?" So I said, "Well my dear, if by that you mean soft porn with overtones of vulgarity, no... The sad thing about prose today is that people are under the impression that if you call something by a different name, it's no longer unpleasant. You know, when you all write about pre-marital sex, what you mean is fornication. If you don't know the word, look it up in the Bible - and the penalties".

Although Burchell continued to be published by Mills & Boon up to her death in 1986, she did not sell as she once did, and clearly was published by the firm for old times' sake. Alan Boon noted that, as she got older, Burchell became more interested in the grandmother in her novels than in the heroine.

"Our readers weren't. They wanted to be chased by heroes. Our readers are reading because they're interested in the girl's experiences. In Burchell's own mind, she'd lost interest," he said.

None the less, Boon, true to his gentlemanly nature, continued to publish Burchell and a number of the old guard as a kind of charity, and with the expectation that their status as grandes dames of the firm would inspire the younger, friskier authors. "I remember when Mary Burchell burst into tears because our editor felt she hadn't got it," Boon recalled. He reassured her that she still did - and in his comforting, resembled the archetypal Alphaman hero. British publishing would not see that style again.

In 1950, Ida Cook wrote her autobiography: We Followed Our Stars, and in 1965, the Cook sisters were honoured as Righteous Gentiles by the Yad Vashem Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Israel, thus joining Oskar Schindler among others.

Mary Burchell learned first hand a lesson in using a controversial foreign background in her romance novels. In 1956 R.J. O'Connell, editor of Woman's Illustrated, invited her to write two serials based on her own experienes in Germany and Eastern Europe before the Second World War. The first, Love is My Reason (which Burchell told readers, "This is the story I always wanted to write"), dealt with displaced persons and refugee camps. The second, Loyal In All, was set in Hungary, around the recent uprising and the Soviet invasion, at the suggestion of O'Connell, as Burchell recalled:

O'Connell said to me, "Well, of course there's only one place where you can start the next serial, and that is in Budapest." So I said, "Well, you understand I have never set foot in Budapest in my life, and this isn't the moment to start." He said, "All the same, I would like you to do it." At least I knew the awfulness of the police knocking on the door at five in the morning, you know, and your father or your husband dragged away in front of you. And so I did it. I got a letter from one woman, and she said, "The description of the escape was so exactly what happened to me that I can hardly believe you didn't know me." I was very gratified.

In real life, Burchell and her sister had recently "adopted" two Hungarian refugee families in a Displaced Persons' Camp in Bavaria. In this serial, Marika Stevens is a young nurse in a Budapest clinic, where she assist the dashing and mysterious Dr von Raszay to escape from the evil secret police. Marika's mother is Hungarian, and her father is English. With a friendly journalist, Rodney Dering, in tow, they witness the uprising ("The Revolution has begun") and the brutal Soviet invasion. The trio, along with a gaggle of orphans and elderly, flee the city and head for the Austrian border, helping the injured along the way. Amid the snipers' bullets and bomb explosions, Marika and von Raszay fall in love. Wading through the swamp marshes, they face danger:

They all stopped then and listened intently, gripped by a common instinct which told them danger was near.

For some time all they heard was the night wind stirring the rushes. But then - horribly near . came the sound of a shot, and Marika was near enough to Rodney to hear the sleeping child on his back stir in her slumber.

"The guards are shooting!" she thought, and an icy chill dried the perspiration of exhaustion on her face.

Then two or three shots followed in quick succession, and away to the right of them they heard a cry.

Pity and terror were drowned in the overwhelming realization that they were not the target this time. And though she was ashamed that the stark will to live crowded out all other considerations, Marika felt sick with relief.

Marika "has lived through enough strain to kill most people". But the group makes it safely to Austria, and is reunited with Marika's parents. Marika accept von Raszay's proposal in the obligatory happy ending:

He bent his head then and gave her a long kiss on the mouth. She forgot then that her parents were looking on. She forgot that there were still problems to solve and arguments to settle. She only knew that this was what she had wanted during all the dark and terrible days of her adventures.

"I'll do - whatever you say," she repeated in a whisper.

Readers of Woman's Illustrated and Mills & Boon novels, however, were not happy, despite the ending. Burchell's novel intertwined strong political sentiments and somewhat graphic violence with a traditional love story, and the recipe unsettled readers.

"We received letters of complaints - "We don't like Mary Burchell now, she's gone over to horror stories,"" Burchell recalled. "You see, they didn't want that. They wanted romance. Both of my books ended happily, but they didn't like the feeling of a very disagreebale reality." The rebellion of her core readership was something that Burchell would long remember. "I wasn't dying to write any more like that," she said."

She helped to found and was for many years president of the Romantic Novelist's Association. As Mary Burchell, she wrote over a hundred romance novels, many of which were translated, and her most famous work is "The Warrender Saga", a series about the opera world, full of real details. She also wrote as James Keene with William Everett Cook.

Ida Cook passed away on December 22, 1986 and her sister Louise in 1991.

She was the biographer of Tito Gobbi. In a radio interview she told a lovely story about him. She was sitting watching Tito Gobbi conduct at a music festival after he had retired from the stage, and in a break he asked her politely if she would mind moving her seat. When she asked why his reply was 'I cannot see Tilda' (his wife). At this stage, they had probably been married for some 50 years and he said he liked to be able to look up and see her there. Lovely.

First Book - Wife to Christopher (1936): Wife to Christopher

Last Book - On Wings of Song (1985): On Wings Of Song (Harlequin Romance)

Source: Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon

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1946

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Mary Burchell (1904 - December 22, 1986)

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