Elizabeth Carfrae (March 21, 1879 – 1968)

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Elizabeth Carfrae was born in Dover on March 21, 1879, and then the family moved to Edmonton, Middlesex, a suburb of London. In the British Census of 1881, the family is listed as residing at 21 Chauncey Street, The Hyde, Edmonton, Middlesex. John Mowll Wrightson (Elizabeth’s father)'s occupation was listed as "Clerk, Emigration Office."

No doubt inspired by the success of Louise Gerard and Joan Sutherland, Mills & Boon promoted grandly two other authors of romantic fiction in the 1920s: Elizabeth Carfrae and Denise Robins. Both were prolific writers, and their sales would serve to consolidate the Mills & Boon romantic fiction list begun by Sutherland and Gerard.

Carfrae, who was matron of one of the houses at Rugby School, was brought to Mills & Boon by an agent. Her first contract, in 1924, was for three novels, for which she received a £30 advance, and the usual 10 per cent terms. The first novel, Barbed Wire, featured what would become a Carfrae trademark: a high-spirited, independent, and somewhat daring heroine. Joy Beresford, just 16, is the daughter of a university professor.

She asks her new governess, “All the men in books kiss the heroine passionately, and I want to know what it’s like. Do tell me, Robin.” She is determined to marry a “very handsome six-footer”, and she does: Stephen Barclay, an artist with “colossal shoulders” who rents the neighbouring house.

By the time she moved on to Hutchinson in 1942, Carfrae had written 23 novels for Mills & Boon in 17 years. Early on, she was evidently very pleased by her success, and with her publishers.

In 1928 she understandably dedicated her latest novel, The Distant Stars, “To Charles Boon, Whose kindness and help has enabled me to add a new clause to my profession of faith and to say with truth and heartfelt gratitude: “I believe in the great humanity of publishers.””

No wonder: Mills & Boon positioned Carfrae as a star.

“Within three years Elizabeth Carfrae has become one of the most widely read novelists,” ran one advertisement in October 1927. “Elizabeth Carfrae (A Mills & Boon discovery) is a novelist full of action and resource, and many thousands of readers are clamouring for her novels.”

The authors who stand out in the 1920s lists of Mills & Boon were all writing what has been classified as “romantic” fiction: Joan Sutherland, Louise Gerard, Elizabeth Carfrae, and Denise Robins. These authors were “pushed” often and the publicity surrounding them was never modest. This strategy demonstrates that Charles Boon recognized the emerging market, and the money to be earned by large sales of cheaper, half-crown (2s. 6d.) editions.

It’s interesting to see how Robins and Carfrae were used by Mills & Boon to establish its two popular fiction lists: first edition and cheaper editions. New titles by these authors were sometime offered at full price (7s. 6d.), but sometimes at the cheaper price (2s. 6d.), to bolster the low end of the market. The firm’s strategy was shared with readers and booksellers in a 1928 advertisement, entitled, “Mills & Boon’s Popular 2/6 Novels”:

“(The 2/8 Novels) are selling in tens of thousands, but booksellers know how they sell. Last year Mills & Boon introduced Elizabeth Carfrae’s Novels to Half-Crown readers, and they have sold in thousands, and are selling better every day. This year Mills & Boon introduce the novels of Denise Robins in this extraordinary successful Library, and the first three volumes will be The Inevitable End, The Passionate Flame and White Jade, to be followed by other during the Autumn. The Inevitable End has enjoyed remarkable success in 7/6 form, and is certain to appeal to tens of thousands of readers in Half-Crown form. The Passionate Flame and White Jade are entirely new long novels – never before published – and issued in the first place at 2/6 net. Mills & Boon are confident that the Denise Robins Novels will repeat the remarkable successes of the other novelists in this superb series, such as Louise Gerard, Joan Sutherland, Elizabeth Carfrae, Sinclair Gluck, Victor Bridges, etc, etc.”

In the Menzies List for April 1929, a large ad entitled “A Mills & Boon Page” advertised “The Elizabeth Carfrae Novels” (6, including the latest, Guarded Heights), and “The Denise Robins Novels” (9, including the latest, Heavy Clay). Seemingly on the strength of these two women alone, Mills & Boon was restored to prosperity by the end of the 1920s.

Sales of the Mills & Boon Half-Crown Library soared, from 162.266 in 1929 to a high of 499.662 in 1935. This library, which contained “all-new” and reprinted titles by Robins, Carfrae, and others, was pitched especially to the smaller commercial libraries. Although the profit margin on these titles was lower than for first editions, the volume sold would have translated into good cash flow for the firm. Moreover, at the same time, Mills & Boon was increasing the number of new titles published each month. The publication list for January-June 1938, for example, contained 47 new novels (by 36 authors) and 37 reprints: a total of 84 publications, or 14 per month – and all of them romances.

Since the First World War Mills & Boon's publication lists had become increasingly dominated by fiction, especially by women authors, and usually of a "popular" vein, namely romance and adventure novels. By 1929 the firm's best-selling authors were all writing romantic fiction: Denise Robins, Elizabeth Carfrae, Louise Gerard, and Sophie Cole.

Elizabeth Carfrae’s 1929 novel Payment in Full is a fantastic multi-generation saga that seemingly pushed Mills & Boon to the moral limits – and certainly helps to explain Carfrae’s immense popularity. John Alloway, kindly rector of St. Augustine’s, is abandoned by his promiscuous wife, and heads to America for a new life with his baby daughter, Elizabeth. On her eighteenth birthday, Elizabeth, now a great beauty is orphaned and left penniless. She loves Christopher “Kit” Mallory, son of the wealthiest man in town, but his father forbids a liaison, given the scandal concerning her mother. In her grief, Elizabeth accepts a proposal from George Hutton, a Jamaican sugar plantation owner twenty-five years her senior. She does not love him, but he stood “between her and starvation”. They live in Jamaica, where Elizabeth is shy and withdrawn. After three pregnancies and three stillbirths (“If I had loved him, his children wouldn’t have died… I didn’t care enough to keep them alive.”), George takes the doctor’s advice and sends Elizabeth away, alone, for a restorative cruise to Havana. There she meets Kit again, now a dashing US naval officer, and they rekindle their romance. Despite her married state, Elizabeth convinces Kit to spend two weeks together, largely in bed. Her ulterior motive: to bear Kit’s child, which would make her miserable life in Jamaica more bearable. Their lovemaking is endless:

”I’m a rotter and a cad, and I ought to be shot, but – oh, gosh, Elizabeth, I’m so happy I could stand on my head. Here and now. We’ll play “let’s pretend” to the last second and the final curtain…”

He knew nothing the world could ever give him could, for one moment, equal the marvel of Elizabeth’s selfless, glad surrender or touch of mystery of the love they found together in these miracle-laden 14 days.

On her return to Jamaica, George finds his wife a changed woman, informing the doctor she’s even happy to make love:

“She’s extraordinarily pleased about it herself… It’s the first time she’s appeared even interested.”

No wonder: Elizabeth is pregnant, and has an “unusual” eight-month baby girl, Elinor, nicknamed Nona. Because George is overjoyed by Nona, and their plantation home, “Content”, is truly a happy one, Elizabeth justifies her actions and her adultery:

“She’d perpetuated what every one would consider a perfectly scandalous and hideous sin, and, by doing so, had supplied Content with the one thing it needed to reach perfection in George’s eyes, and George himself with the greatest joy he’d ever had in his life.”

This being escapist romance, Carfrae tied up all the loose ends. George is thrown from a horse and paralysed. Elizabeth prays for his recovery (although she admits, “Don’t – please, dear God – let me want George to die”). But he does, and in the final scene, Kit and Elizabeth, both now in their mid-forties, are enjoying their honeymoon. Amazingly, pangs of conscience are dismissed by both:

”If we did something that the world would call a sin, we’ve had to pay for it. In all these years of loneliness. In fact that I can never claim my own daughter. That I had to give her to another man. But poor Hutton worshipped the ground she walked over, Elizabeth… Ethically it was all wrong, of course. We knew that at the time, but we did make Hutton happy, Elizabeth. If you ever look back now, you can always remember that.”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s just that, Christopher, that has made the looking back even possible. Even bearable. Only – need we look back any more, Kit?... I’d so much rather remember what George said to me once about being happy after he died and look forward, Kit.”

Carfrae’s novel, a best-seller, was an unusual, even heterodox novel for Mills & Boon to publish in 1929. The rigid “formula” that governed the future Mills & Boon romance was still quite loose.

In Payment in Full, Elizabeth Carfrae devotes long passages to condemning “modern” girls and their predatory instincts, even though her heroine, Elizabeth, is less than pure, having cheated on her husband and borne another man’s child. That child, Nona, grows to be a beautiful but wild teenager, who unknowingly tries to seduce her real father, Captain Kit Mallory. Elizabeth ponders her wayward daughter and her wild circle:

They were, she thought, watching Nona, like hunters tracking an unwary animal. Padding behind it. Waiting to pounce. Revolting almost in the dogged persistence of their trail.

It didn’t help matters either that Nona wasn’t the only one. They all did it, these modern girls, in one way or another. Either in their clothes or their manners or the shameless invitation of their eyes. It wasn’t, Elizabeth told herself bitterly, to be wondered at if trouble followed so swiftly on the heels of these hunts.

When Kip’s ship docks in Jamaica, Nona meets and falls hard for him, but not before Elizabeth tells Kit that Nona is his daughter. Nona smuggles herself aboard the ship and into Kit’s bed; he finds her and erupts, calling her friends “a selfish, soulless, heartless, brainless ser of little idiots who ought to be whipped and sent to bed”. In a long soliloquy, Kit ponders the immorality, pitying men who are trapped by such “minxes”:

The way she looked at him. Didn’t she realize, the utter little fool, that she couldn’t play that game with men and get away with it? Without leaving a stain in her freshness somewhere?...

The little minx. So wrapped up in her own egoism and supreme self-assurance and impudence that she could dare play any sort of damfool game. And if things went wrong, it’d be the man who’d be blamed. Who’d be a blackguard and a swine and an unmitigated scoundrel to take advantage of a girl’s innocence and trust in him. When, after all, he’d only done what every bit of her, except perhaps her voice, had asked him to try to do, and then let Nature get the upper hand and drown her cries of protest.

It’s difficult to speak of a specific Mills & Boon editorial policy before the Second World War. The reason is obvious: Charles Boon, although restructuring his firm to become a “library house” in the 1930s, was still a general publisher at heart. The 1930s was still a time of experimentation, and novels were novels in their own right. Boon did not impose many restrictions on his authors and, to a large extent, relied on the authors for guidance on current tastes and attitudes. These authors were, increasingly, young women, who brought to their writing a fresh (and up-to-date) point of view. If a book or style sold well, it was copied. Denise Robins, Elizabeth Carfrae, and (to a lesser degree) Louise Gerard were all influential, as were the cinema, the wireless, and popular best-sellers such as Rebecca and Gone with the Wind.

According to Alan Boon, the special attraction which Mills & Boon novels held for women during this period was their “wholesomeness”, a quality which his father promoted. This is not to imply that the novels never took risks. Rather, they were not explicit, not what one would class as “immoral”. They were “romantic” in the way they dealt with relationships, and they always ended happily.

“Father was very careful about the moral line, about the boundaries you could not cross,” Boon said. “But he was not very hesitant of sex. In a curious way, the novels were more permissive in a sense than today.”

These so-called “sexy” books were written by Louise Gerard, Denise Robins, and Elizabeth Carfrae.

With the expansion of circulating libraries, sales of Mills & Boon novels were prodigious. On average, in the 1930s between 6.000 and 8.000 copies of each title were printed. Of these, as many as 3.000 would be kept and sold later as a cheap edition. Each of the library chains had standing orders. Boots purchased between 300 and 500 copies of each title, and Argosy & Sundial Libraries, up to 700 copies. Public libraries, if they ordered at all (prejudice against spending public money on “trash” books was common), took 150 copies. By the middle of the 1930s, Mills & Boon promised to issue two to four new books every fortnight. The numbers Mills & Boon dangled before the public in newspaper advertisements were impressive. In February 1935 Denise Robins, with 35 novels to her credit, had sold 506.000 copies, an average of 14.500 copies per title. A distant second was Elizabeth Carfrae (264.000; 17 titles), followed by Helena Grose (133.000; 13 titles), Deirdre O’Brien (108.000; 14 titles), and Marjorie M. Price (86.000; 10 titles).

Mills & Boon’s penetration of the library market is evident in the writings and surveys of the period. When in 1935 F.R. Richardson wrote in defence of the “Circulating Library”, he noted indirectly the popularity of Mills & Boon among borrowers, “a new reading public which is being reached for the first time by salesmanship adapted to their mentality and circumstances”:

In the long run anything which makes more people read more books is for the good of the readers themselves and of the book trade as a whole, and it is just this service which the circulating libraries perform: they extend the reading public… In every section, however, the life of the individual book is becoming shorter, again a result of over-production. There are some exceptions. The works of such a writer as Hugh Walpole go on for ever; and so, too, do some pleasant novels (those of Elizabeth Carfrae, for instance) which have never been trumpeted in any quarter, but have the most effective and persistent of all advertisements – friendly recommendation from one to another of that great majority of readers who are seeking only good recreation, and care nothing about being au fait with “the book of the moment”.

Carfrae was, as we have seen, one of the Mills & Boon’s top sellers (as, ironically, Walpole once was). Similarly, in 1935 the Bookseller analysed the stock of “one of the largest and newest” of the commercial libraries in a quest to reveal “What the Public Likes”. Among the Mills & Boon authors listed in “the best-seller class” (alongside Edgar Wallace) were Denise Robins, Joan Sutherland, Sophie Cole, Louise Gerard, Elizabeth Carfrae, Deirdre O’Brien, and Marjorie M. Price.

In 1938 Ronald F. Batty, author of How to Run a Twopenny Library (whose publications attests to the popularity and financial rewards offered by commercial libraries), listed "The Most Popular Twopenny Library Authors". Under the category "Love and Romance", sixty-eight authors were listed. Of these, eight were Mills & Boon regulars, including Elizabeth Carfrae, Sophie Cole, Louise Gerard, Helena Grose, Marjorie M. Price, and Marjorie Warby.

First Book - Barbed Wire (1925)

Last Book - Brief Enchantment (1962)

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