In memory of Esther Wyndham

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Mary Lutyens, a prolific novelist, biographer, magazine writer and editor whose career spanned more than six decades, passed away April 9, 1999. She was 90. Lutyens, whose father was the well-known architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and whose maternal grandfather, the Earl of Lytton, was viceroy of India from 1876-1880, died in London.

Although she wrote 13 novels and excelled as an editor, she was most acclaimed for her biographies, including writings on her father's work, her parents' unhappy marriage and her grandfather. She also wrote a biographical series on the Indian religious teacher Krishnamurti, who was a spiritual adviser to her mother, and about art critic and social theorist John Ruskin and his wife Effie. One of her best known biographies, "Millais and the Ruskins," explored John and Effie's relationship with Sir John Everett Millais, the father of Pre-Raphaelite painting. It described the impact of Millais' love for Effie on the Ruskin marriage and its eventual collapse.

"You so often have to write the book you want to read," The Daily Telegraph quoted her as having once said.

Her autobiography, "To be Young," was published in 1959. Lutyens was born July 31, 1908 and was educated at Queen's College in London and in Sydney, Australia. She began her career as a fiction writer with the 1933 "Forthcoming Marriages," and wrote several novels before World War II. After the war, she wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Esther Wyndham.

Lutyens was married twice, first to stockbroker Anthony Sewell from 1930-1945, then to royal furrier and art expert J. G. Links in 1945. Links died in 1997.

To read more:

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Comments

[kopernik.livejournal.com]

Royal furrier? Oh, those crazy royals.

I read a few of her Harlequins long ago. One of them was quite unusual because it was about a young couple that married for love and most of the book was about them working through marry-in-haste type problems. I don't think I ever read any similar books in the Harlequin line, really. There can't have been very many of them, at least back then.

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

I believe she was quite an unusual woman even among the Mill&Boons authors. Strange is that, even if M&B was a very strict editor, with rules to respect and quite conservative, they had in their stables a variety of authors whose life sometime was even more interesting than the books they wrote. Mary Burchell was a war heroine, Elizabeth Gilzean was the daughter of a female adventurer, and many of them were daughters of English aristocracy, with quite an interesting personal life.

Elisa

[kopernik.livejournal.com]

I did know that about Mary Burchell, although I haven't read her autobiography (I personally own dozens of her titles - they are some of my favorite comfort reads.)

I also once saw a book that listed a bunch of Harlequin authors who used multiple pseudonyms. Some of them were painfully obvious, even to someone who is as unobservant as I am.

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

If you like to browse some romance authors of the past, I collect them in my website:

http://www.elisarolle.com/romance/romance_history.htm

It's a list I update every 2/3 months addings some authors. I find some of this lifes really fascinanting.

Elisa