Violet Winspear (April 28, 1928 - 1989)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Violet Winspear (April 28, 1928 – 1989) was an English writer of 70 romance novels in Mills & Boon from 1961 to 1987.

In studying the history of Mills & Boon, we can trace the evolution of the firm’s greatest achievement and the source of its financial success – the imprint, a recognizable brand name that has given Mills & Boon a distinct advantage in sales.

“At your library you can always ask for “a Mills & Boon novel” in the confidence that you will get an enjoyable story”, the firm assured readers in the 1950s.

But while Mills & Boon did promote its imprint more aggressively than it did individual authors, exceptions abounded, and certain “stars” have often received more attention than others. And they did play an important role. These authors, such as Denise Robins in the 1930s, Lilian Warren (“Rosalind Brett”) in the 1950s, and Violet Winspear in the 1960s, set new standards for the Mills & Boon novel, and in their success inspired – and elevated – the rest of the “team” of writers.

“Authors really take in each other’s washing, if you like, and learn by reading each other’s books,” Alan Boon said. “This would help to lift them higher in the Mills & Boon operation.”

As an introduction to Romance in the “Swinging Sixties”, it’s instructive to consider two authors, one from the beginning of the decade and one from the end, which represent the changing style of the Mills & Boon romance. The authors in question, Rachel Lindsay (Roberta Leigh) and Violet Winspear, were among the firm’s most popular and successful. Both were also as influential on the style of the romantic novel in the 1960s as Lilian Warren and Esther Wyndham were in the 1950s.

Fortunately for Alan Boon, several popular authors made their debuts in the 1960s and would go on to publish for decades, to great acclaim. The majority arrived without an agent in tow, but via the unsolicited slush pile. Among these was Violet Winspear, whose first novel, Lucifer’s Angel, was published in 1961. Born in Hackney, Winspear worked in a variety of jobs from the age of 14, including as a clerk in a W.H. Smith shop, a dishwasher in a pie shop, and a packer in a cake mix factory. An avid reader of Mills & Boon novels, Winspear continued with odd jobs until royalties allowed her to quit and write full-time.

As a writer, Winspear was the mistress of titillation and a mild form of eroticism which explains her lack of popularity in Canada. She never crossed the moral line in her novels, but often came perilously close. Lucifer’s Angel, for example, contained what would become Winspear trademarks: a glamorous setting (the Hollywood film industry), a darkly handsome, brooding hero (famous director Lew Marsh), and a young heroine (Fay) tortured by circumstances. Fay and Lew are married, but for convenience, not love. Eventually they will find happiness together, but not before a whirlwind of dramatic events, including a train wreck, talk of divorce, and a miscarriage. Winspear’s description of the hero leaving his bath (watched vicariously by Fay) illustrates her passionate style of writing:

“As she passed him, she put out her own hand and drew her fingertips across his bare back. When he was like this, so boyishly fresh and clean from his bath, his brown skin gleaming, the muscle of his back and his arms rippling with health, he seemed incapable of any despicableness. He seemed like a brown god, come up out of some deep, clean poll of enchantment. He shone with a cleanliness that seemed of the spirit as well as of the body.”

By the end of the decade, Winspear had become Mills & Boon’s topselling author. In twenty years she wrote thirty-seven books. Although most of her novels were set overseas, particularly on Spain, Africa, and Greece – destinations of many an English holidaymaker – Winspear herself had never been abroad.

“Her knowledge of life came from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films,” Alan Boon recalled. “Her style was flamboyant. That was very successful, financially. But you wouldn’t have expected her to be able to write as she did. She was a Cockney girl, obviously highly sexed, but not experienced as all. She was getting her knowledge of it second hand.”

In 1968 Mills & Boon, now a powerful and successful publishing company, celebrated its Diamond Anniversary. It did so with a publicity coup: the publication of a report on its readership that challenged the old stereotypes – and made Mills & Boon even more attractive to potential buyers.

Interestingly enough, the most popular authors were old-timers. Essie Summers was first with 21 per cent, followed by Kathryn Blair/Rosalind Brett/Celine Conway (13 per cent), Violet Winspear (10), and Anne Weale (10). All of these authors, with the exception of Winspear (and Lilian Warren, who was dead), were well over the age of 30. The favourite type of story contained a “foreign background”, with 48 per cent, followed by the Doctor-Nurse storyline (21 per cent), and the “Mystery Romance” (11). Winspear’s The Honey is Bitter (1967), set in Greece, was cited as “Top of the Pops”, the most popular title. In this typical Winspear novel, young Domini agrees to marry stern Paul Stephanos to save her family from its crippling debts. One in Greece, her feelings begin to turn to affection, even love, for this “devastatingly attractive man”. In the finale, they are drawn together as true man and wife:

He gathered her close to him. “Sun, moon and stars are dark right now, Domini, as in Samson’s song,” he murmured. “What if they stay dark for me?”

“Two people can see across mountain and oceans. Paul, if they’re together and in need of each other.”

“For better or worse you’re my husband,” she said to him. “We can’t break the marriage bond whatever else we destroy.”

Another classic Court of the Veils (1968) also stands out because the hero spells out his attraction for the heroine for being a 'deep girl' compared to her foil who preferred much dancing and friovolous gaiety.

Violet Winspear's novels take the readers around the world, like in The Palace of the Peacocks (1969). Even though many of her storylines are uninspiring, she excels at boldly using the written words to picturize the surroundings of her plots.

Many established Harlequin novelists such as Robyn Donald and Kay Thorpe, employ sexual antagonism in developing conflict in their stories. For instance, Robyn Donald creates leaping sexual awareness between men and women. Since men are quick to acknowledge this vital force, Robyn casts them into the role of hunter and as women label it as a weakness to despise and overcome, she makes them the prey. This is the adversarial set up that drives her plots forward.

The Palace of the Peacocks (1969) is a Violet Winspear classic. In this story Winspear showcases a Java island and its people with extreme delicacy contributing to both realism and a sense of escapist reading one and the same time for her post-World War II English readers.

In The Palace of the Peacocks (1969) Temple Lane reveals a streak for adventure when she travels to a far away island in the Java Seas in search of her fiance Nick. A disillusioned Temple takes the initiative to pose as a boy to obtain the last cabin bunk available in the outgoing steamer. She then accepts a temporary job offer by Dutchman Ryk van Helden, a local plantation manager.

A criticism of this story must be that although Temple is excited by Ryk, the question goes unanswered as to why should Ryk find Temple desirable. It happens that in the island of Bayanura, Temple is the only white women in miles. And so, despite Temple Lane's spunky attempts at adventure, she comes across as yet another of Winspear's unoriginal heroines.

Paperback publishing was the last step in the standardization of the look and length of Mills & Boon novels. By their nature, paperbacks encouraged a common appearance and size. During the 1960s the regulation book length was enforced – 188 to 192 pages, whether hardback or paperback. Jacket design also evolved, with the same artwork used for the hardcover jacket as for the paperback cover. The biggest change, apart from increasingly trendy appearance of the heroes and heroines, was in the format. The artist’s canvas was narrowed, as titles and authors were now printed on a broad band across the top. Generally, the heroine, who used to share billing with the hero, appeared more front and centre, dazzling, and confident.

In 1970 Violet Winspear told Alan Boon, “You know my feeling about covers; they’re like a gay coat of paint that helps to sell a boat or a house.”

Violet Winspear regularly shocked the old-timers in the Mills & Boon readership, as often as she delighted the younger generation. In 1970 she submitted to Alan Boon her latest manuscript, The Tawny Sands, which she called “a love story in the Blair-Brett tradition but with a dash of the desert added to the personality of Don Raul”:

“I have always been intrigued by the desert island theme, and decided to placer a man and a girl almost alone in the desert itself. This gave me the chance to air my dialogue and to build up tension when Janna, a little nobody, finds herself thrown by the winds of chance into the keeping of Raul Cesar Bey – one of my “beloved tyrant” type of heroes.”

The Tawny Sands was one of Winspear’s most popular novels, although it is yet another retread of Rebecca storyline. Janna, 20 and an orphan (parents remain non-existent in Mills & Boon novels), is secretary and dogsbody to a wealthy lady author on the Cote D’Azur. There she meets Don Raul Cesar de Romanos, a mysterious Spanish nobleman. Janna is instantly attracted to this “dangerous” man: “The face was a little cruel – a lot of it passionate with some suppressed emotion, such as would be present if such a man was not given the free rein that handsome, arrogant, supple creatures demanded. He reminded her, somehow, of a panther in a cage.” In the hotel pool, Don Raul swims naked, watched intently by Janna (who, quite unlike Mills & Boon heroines of the past, does not blush): she finds him “bronzed from his throat to his heels, naked as a statue of Apollo in a pagan garden… rippling with tight-coiled muscles as one of those superb jungle creatures.”

Don Raul convinces Janna to accompany him to Morocco as his “fiancée” to appease his family. There he dresses her in silks and jewels, while Don Raul is transformed into an Arab sheik (“The faint slant to his dark eyes was intensified here,” Janna observes). Suddenly Janna discovers her conscience and tries to resist Don Raul’s lecherous advances, suffering many bruising kisses. Growing angry, he ridicules her “vocation to spinsterhood”, to which she retorts, “I’d sooner be a spinster than just an object!” They openly discuss sex:

”I expect you’ve sown quite a few wild oats.”

“It’s in the nature of a man, nina. And in the nature of a woman to prefer a bit of the devil to a lot of self-righteousness.”

“I know that.” She broke into a smile. “I’m not an absolute prude, though you keep harping on my innocence. I am twenty years old.”

They sleep side by side in the desert, endure dust storms, and survive a swarm of locusts. Ultimately they fall madly in love and marry, Janna “lost in the arms of her desert lover”.

Winspear’s fans could not get enough of her passionate romances, which were usually set in exotic foreign lands. Reader response to The Tawny Sands, Winspear told Boon, was incredible.

“I believe in their hearts that quite a few men like to think of themselves as sheiks in disguise, and quite a few women would enjoy being carried off to where the dishes are washed in the sand and there are no beds to make!” she wrote.

Maybe so, but soon after The Tawny Sands’s publication, Winspear aroused considerable controversy by her remarks on the BBC Man Alive programme, and in a companion interview in the Radio Times. Winspear, described as possessing “man mania” and having sold 700.000 novels in the US and Britain to date, got carried away in revealing her vision of the archetypal romantic hero:

“I get my heroes so that they’re lean and hard muscled and mocking and sardonic and tough and tigerish and single, of course. Oh and they’ve got to be rich and then I make it that they’re only cynical and smooth on the surface. But underneath they’re well, you know, sort of lost and lonely. In need of love but, when roused, capable of breathtaking passion and potency. Most of my heroes, well all of them really, are like that. They frighten but fascinate. They must be the sort of men who are capable of rape: men it’s dangerous to be alone in the room with.”

The reference to rape would haunt Winspear for the rest of her career, even though her (crude) description spoke for generations of brooding and threatening Mills & Boon heroes.

“I hope my image at the Woman’s Weekly has not been damaged by the vitriol,” Winspear told Boon. “I did say that heroes of romantic novels, in the Rhett Butler, Rochester tradition, should be capable of rape. If the girl is not virginal there is no danger.”

Winspear claimed to know exactly what her readers wanted in their heroes, as well as in their heroines:

“As these girls are rarely in the running for the Miss World prize it seems rather foolish if they go around presuming that some tycoonish guy is panting to kiss and fondle them, and it rather robs the girls pride if they are continually in a state of heat. I prefer that romantic heroines should have pride if not stunning beauty, and they should be as mystified by the hero’s intentions as the reader of the book.”

The biggest editorial influence of the decade came from overseas, and the editors – led by Mary Bonnycastle – at Harlequin Books. Alan Boon did his best to satisfy his “North American associates”, as it was in the best financial interests of Mills & Boon. In letter after letter, Boon encouraged his authors to toe the Canadian line so as to make their manuscripts eligible for the “biggest box office” and the “highest gross”.

But not even the persuasive Alan Boon could stop his authors from maturing as writers, and therein lay the problem. Violet Winspear, Roberta Leigh, Anne Mather, and other talented (and prolific) Mills & Boon authors in the 1960s developed a more openly erotic writing style which would surely send blushes to the cheeks of the Bonnycastles in Canada.

“We were building up a bank, if you like, of authors who the public really liked,” Alan Boon explained. “They had “sex” in them. We had to publish these books. If we hadn’t had the ourage of our convictions and published some of these books – some of them were quite strong and shocking – the authors would have gone to some other publishers.”

Given Mills & Boon’s careful market research, the response from readers was positive, not negative.

“In general, we operated the way the tide flowed. We would decide which way it would flow, using information that was coming up,” Boon said. “We had a lot of readers” letter saying, “I like this” or “I like that.” That would influence our decisions. I don’t think we ever pushed our authors, saying, “You have to make this more licentious.””

Not until well into the 1970s would Mills & Boon follow the trail blazed by the notorious “sex novels” published in the 1960s, and permit premarital sex between the hero and heroine (when Mills & Boon did, it was considered acceptable at the time to the readership, and published under a special series banner). Winspear, Mills & Boon’s “sexiest” author (and regularly banned by Harlequin), resented the sexiest novels and films of the 1960s, devoid of romance but full of rape (Last Tango in Paris, in her estimation, was simply “sheer mental masturbation”). “Too much realistic sex is out of place in the romance,” she wrote to Alan Boon in 1970:

“I go for the vicarious thrill… “Gone with the Wind” when Gable slung Scarlett over his shoulder and marched up those stairs with her – symbolism if I ever saw it! It would have been spoiled if, as in today’s films, he had been shown tearing her clothes off. We had a saying at my old firm – “there’s a difference scratching your back and tearing it to bits”.”

She added, “I don’t agree that women like dirty books. I think that when it comes to fiction women are like men with their shirts, they like them crisp and comfortable at the same time."

In her novels, Winspear was the mistress of euphemism, which enabled her to include “sexier” situations without being the least bit explicit. At the conclusion of The Pagan Island, for example, the marriage-in-name-only between Hebe and her Greek god, Nikos, bursts into love in a particularly vivid description:

With an incoherent murmur she buried her face against the hard warm muscle and bone of him. “I want to stay to be yours, or I want to go away quickly, because I love you too much.”

Firmly then he held her away from him and he searched her face, her eyes, her pleading lips. “Life with a Greek is a bursting skin of wine; a thing of passion and sometimes pain; joy and anger; aggression and surrender. Can you take all that? So fair and slender…”

“Nikos! I am Hebe! Cupbearer to the god!”

Joanna in Raintree Valley (1971) reads an advertising for home help. She answers the add, and gets the job. Adam, the alpha male hero is abrasive, but Joanna falls for him anyway.

The heroine of Black Douglas (1971), forever complaining about the deficiencies in her looks, is accepted by the hero who is blind.

As the 1960s proceeded, Mills & Boon’s relationship with Harlequin grew closer, but more complex. On the one hand, personal relations between the Boon and Bonnycastle families were excellent. They liked each other, and found the business arrangement mutually beneficial. Harlequin could not have expanded without Mills & Boon’s source of titles, nor could Mills & Boon have grown without the financial independence offered by the lifeline to Harlequin.

But Mary Bonnycastle and her daughter Judy continually turned down Mills & Boon’s recommendations for Harlequin paperbacks, despite the fact that these were books which had already been published in Britain, and had sold well. The top authors, including Violet Winspear and Roberta Leigh, were not published by Harlequin until the late 1960s.

In the press release issued by Mills & Boon on 18 December 1971 for its agreement with Harlequin, the following statement is revealing:

“Although Harlequin’s experience has been primarily with fiction, the two firms are fully committed to the growth of the general and educational list. Both small in terms of staff, their plan is to publish as before in a flexible, personal manner. They believe that by bringing together the financial and marketing skills of Harlequin with the publishing expertise of Mills & Boon the two will form a group stronger and more effective than if they remained independent.”

This, then, was the vision of the two companies. In terms of romantic fiction – the product – this statement proved true. Violet Winspear was not enthusiastic, fearing intrusion by foreigners.

“Nothing must happen to you!” she wrote to Alan Boon. “I’d hare to think what would become of the “harem” if anything ever happened to the “sheik” who puts up with out tantrums with a charm that must feel very strained at times. It’s one thing to write a romance; it’s another to deal with the writers of them, all temperamental, and most of them with the female urge to be “harem” favourite!”

Winspear lived with her mother and, like many Mills & Boon authors, never married. Judging from the small mountain of correspondence in the Mills & Boon archive, she had an intense crush on Alan Boon, whom she regarded as the personifiation of the Mills & Boon hero. Boon, in turn, was kind, and often chauffeured Winspear in a Rolls Royce around the English countryside to expand her horizons.

Although Ann Britton and Marion Collin in Romantic Fiction: The New Writers’ Guide (1960) urged authors, “Never set a whole book in a country you have not visited. By doing so you will kill it before the second chapter”, many successful Mills & Boon authors did just that. Violet Winspear, mistress of the Greek romance, never left the south-east of England,” and Ethel Connell (Katrina Britt) had never been away from Blackpool when she wrote about Venice in A kiss in a Gondola, her first novel. But Connell was often challenged over her use of foreign words and phrases. In 1972 a Mills & Boon manuscript reader asked of Alan Boon:

“I would be grateful if you could drop a tactful word to Katrina Britt about her use, or rather misuse, of foreign languages in her stories. She is very fond of doing this, but unfortunately does it so badly that I have to do an enormous amount of searching in dictionaries and correcting. It is obvious from the basic mistakes she makes (“Frauline” instead of “Fraulein” throughout A Spray of Edelweiss) that she has no knowledge whatever of any other language, and she must be aware of this I feel she might emulate Violet’s (Winspear) praiseworthy example and check these languages herself with the aid of a local library or dictionary, or get a more knowledgeable friend to vet them for her.”

Winspear did, indeed, know how to use a phrasebook. But foreign settings and characters raised concerns about accuracy and political controversy.

“Violet Winspear, going to Venice, describes a scene where the heroine had a romantic session on the balcony of one of the bridges there,” Alan Boon recalled. “Loads of Woman’s Weekly readers had been to Venice and knew this was an enclosed bridge.” Hundreds wrote letters.

A hint of danger surrounded the 1960s heroes, particularly Violet Winspear’s Greeks. In The Pagan Island (1972), Hebe is attracted by Nikos Stephanos, who considers women as “flighty as birds”. He is prone to displays of violence:

”To Fate, kyria, who arranges whom we shall meet, to love or hate.” He tilted the glass to his lips. “Drink with me!”

It was an order and she obeyed – and immediately afterwards she was shocked when he deliverately smashed his glass against the edge of the table.

“Why did you do that?”

“Only because I felt like doing it.” He lifted his knife and fork to attack his dinner. “Don’t you ever give way to impulse, or does British restraint hold you back?”

“I should hope my impulses are not so dangerously untidy.”

“A very British attitude…”

Indeed, when Hebe meets rich American tourist Daphne, Daphne teels her why she is entranced by Nikos:

“He throws you, eh? It’s the first time you’ve met a man with a streak of ruthlessness. You’re young and sort of innocent, so perhaps you don’t know that women are just a bit fascinated by the men who make them feel afraid.”

Similarly, in A Amn Apart, Libby Mason, 19 and well-off, is instantly attracted by gardener/bricklayer, Adam Roscoe. He kisses her sduddenly: “hard on the mouth and her blood caught fire. She wantend nothing, needed nothing in the world but him.” But her Uncle Graham considers him a crook and a wastrel, and forbids Libby to continue seeing him:

”I can see that a young girl like yourself might think it all very romantic to be wandering around the country like a gipsy, but I won’t have this man in my house, and I won’t have you going to that shack of his on the hills either. For God’s sake, girl, can’t you see the sort of risk you’re running?”

Linny said blunty, “What do you think he’s going to do? Rape me?”

“I wouldn’t put it pas him.”

“Well, I would. And I do know him a little better than you do.”

“You’re not to see him again, Libby.”

“You can’t stop me!”

But it turns out Adam is a writer who pens a best-seller, The Loner. In the end, Uncle Graham admits that Adam’s talent shows “a touch of genius”.

Alan Boon’s difficulties with Harlequin concerning the “sex” in Mills & Boon novels did not last long after the 1972 takeover. Harlequin realized the difficulty in not publishing certain best-selling titles by British authors in Canada.

“Judy Burgess and her mother, being conservative people, basically enjoyed publishing “sweet” stories,” recalled Lawrence Heisey. “And the Boons were getting authors leading in a new direction. They kept putting aside these spicier books. And Alan came to me and said, “If we don’t publish these books, we’re going to lose these authors. “They’ll go somewhere else.”” Heisey added that the problem did not actually lie in the Bonnycastles, as was thought, “It wasn’t that the Bonnycastles didn’t think these were good books,” he said. “They were making judgements erroneously for our readers. They felt our reader weren’t up to this, just like publishers had been doing for years. Well, they haven’t read anything like this because we hadn’t published anything like this.”

To break the ice, Heisey arranged for four of Mills & Boon’s “spicier” novels by Violet Winspear, Anne Mather, and Anne Hampson to be published in a trial run to a random selection of North American readers and under a special banner, “Harlequin Presents”. The books were a hit – and the spell was broken.

In 1973, Winspear became a launch author for the new Harlequin Presents line of category romance novels. Harlequin Presents books were more sexually explicit than the previous line, Harlequin Romance, under which Winspear had been published. She was chosen to be a launch author because she, along with Anne Mather and Anne Hampson were the most popular and prolific of Harlequin's authors.

The theory of “reader identification” so cherished by Mills & Boon for thirty years was put to test in the 1960s with the newfangled heroes. Although the heroine remained an approachable figure with all her faults and insecurities, the heroes became more obscure, daring, and even fantastic. Violet Winspear wrote of this to Alan Boon in 1973, when she submitted her latest, Palace of the Pomegranate:

“I was rather worried that Mills & Boon might not like the idea of a Persian hero. I know there is a lot said about “reader identification” but it isn’t really possible in the fullest sense. If so, then one would have to write about young scrubbers, tired housewives, ailing grandmothers, etc. And who on earth can truly identify with a sardonic Spanish Don, a handsome surgeon, a dashing Italian, or a bittersweet Greek? The real aim of romance is to provide escape and entertainment, not to dish up “real life” and “real life people” on a plate with egg on it!”

But some readers could identify with Winspear’s exotic heroes. In 1972 Winspear received a letter and wedding photo from Charmaine da Silva Campos of Mozambique:

“Oh what wondful (sic), lovely and real stories you write. Romantic fiction would be dead and boring without you.” She was just married to her Portuguese boyfriend: “My husband’s name is José Alberto da Silva Campos – not quite as long as the lovelynames you give your characters, but still. Also he is not a Conde or Marquis or Principe, but he is the Prince of my life.”

In the 1970s Many Mills & Boon authors stopped writing for the firm out of principle, refusing to participate in what they termed “soft porn” peddling. By 1975 Violet Winspear, once at the top of Mills & Boon’s charts, had also had enough, and decided to follow Barbara Cartland’s example and write historical romances, set in past times when heroines were always virgins and naturally accepted as such. She wrote to Alan Boon:

“It may well be that I will find a reading public which likes an author to go rather deeper into romantic motives than certain other very pop authors go. Many readers haven’t the time to probe and wonder, and are happy enough with the pulsating clinches that occur at intervals throughout the book.”

Winspear was clearly disturbed by “these sex hungry times. The sex must have gone off somewhat for people to be so in search of it. I do, indeed, get the impression that men are more in love with their cars than their wives, and that wives are more in love with their freezers and their foreign holidays.”

In 1976 a reporter asked Winspear how she came to know so much about Greek men in describing her heroes.

“What a laugh!” she wrote to Alan Boon, “I worked for six months in a place with an engineering works next door, almost exclusively manned by Greeks, and a right lot of cheeky b’s they were! They seemed to fondly imagine that every female was panting to get pregnant by them. They’d actually shout it out; “Wanna baby, baby?” It’s a good thing for the romances that I tone down the actual fortissimo!!!!”

On the flip side, against the inferiority of the heroine, the hero is over confident to the point of being unreasonbale, like in The Valdez Marriage (1977). More often than not in Winspear's stories, it appears that only a woman indulging in masochism can fall for such heroes.

Even an unimaginative melodrama such as The Valdez Marriage (1977) retains its vivid portrayal of place and atmosphere. In The Valdez Marriage, a young girl is lured to the side of a school friend by his overbearing brother. She is blamed for the accident which crippled her friend, even though the latter's uninvited groping caused the car accident. Add to this a dour housekeeper, sexy distant relative and an ancient mansion.

Employing the same motif of sexual antagonism, Winspear however, contrasts her hero and heroine in such extremes that the heroine lacks awareness of her own sexuality against the hero who is fully aware of his, like in The Time of the Temptress (1978). This lends her stories an acute imbalance in character development where the heroine is left bemused with an alpha male hero who exerts overwhelming control over every situation.

Winspear reinforces a non-entity driven personality of the heroine against a larger than life hero, like in The Awakening of Alice (1978). It is not that the heroine lacks intelligence or initiative. But she lacks self esteem in her role as a woman. Whereas Winspear makes it clear as to the sex appeal of the hero, it is not always understandable why the heroine would be attractive in the same way. As a consequent, although the heroine is duly attracted to the hero, it remains unconvincing as to why the hero is likewise attracted to the heroine..

The Time of the Temptress (1978) conveys its jungle surrounding very realistically, especially with an episode where an unsuspecting Eve is besieged by crabs. Caught amidst an African civil war, Eve and Wade are forced to make their escape out of the jungle on foot. Despite Wade's ceaseless taunts and jeers, in a case of Stockholm syndrome, where Eve finds herself totally dependent on Wade for her rescue, she falls in love with him.

A plain Jane Alice in The Awakening of Alice (1978) steps out of her comfort zone as she travels to a Greek island to tidy up a mess created by her glamorous sister. The awakening of love in this story is more convincing since it also gives a reason for the hero's attraction for Alice who resembels his past fiance. However, the imbalance in the equity between the two main characters is apparent when Alice is held against her wishes by the Greek hero, with whom she falls in love.

The local color to add 'eh' after each sentence is unavoidable when reading Violet Winspear. However, unlike Flora Kidd's rendering of Scottish inspired dialogues, Winspear's attempt takes away from the general flow of conversation rather than adding substance to it.

Violet Winspear writes in a style that is not sufficiently modern for present day readers. However, the use of archaic turn of phrasing and dialogues create a by-gone era mood in step with her subject material.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Winspear

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




















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