Skip to main content

September 1, 1906



Eleanor Alice Burford (September 1, 1906 to January 18, 1993) was born in London and married George Percival Hibbert, a businessman some years older than she, when she was in her early twenties. She was very beautiful. He died in the 1960s. Mrs. Hibbert was very private and information about her life is sparse. Her father worked odd jobs and she dropped out of school to work in a shop. But marriage gave her time to write. Her husband was a leather merchant and shared her love of books. According to her New York Times obituary:

In all, Mrs. Hibbert wrote about 200 novels. They were romantic tales, often filled with rich historical detail, that regularly featured young women living in castles and country manors. She said she focused on "women of integrity and strong character" who were "struggling for liberation, fighting for their own survival."

Her books, which were translated into 20 languages, were especially popular in her native England, the United States and Australia. Although some critics dismissed her books, others found them well-done works of their type.

Her first published novel was "Beyond the Blue Mountains" (1947), under the Plaidy name. Eventually she wrote 90 Plaidy books, many of which were historical novels about royalty.

In 1960 she tried a new name and a new genre. At the suggestion of an agent, Patricia Schartle Myrer, Mrs. Hibbert wrote a romantic suspense novel set in Cornwall and published under the Victoria Holt pen name. The result, "Mistress of Mellyn," was an instant international best seller.

Thirty more Holt novels followed, establishing Mrs. Hibbert as a pioneer in the romantic suspense or Gothic genre.

Here are the names under which she wrote:

Eleanor Burford,
Jean Plaidy,
Elbur Ford,
Kathleen Kellow,
Ellalice Tate,
Anna Percival,
Victoria Holt,
Philippa Carr.

It was as Victoria Holt that Hibbert wrote the romance novel, The Shadow of the Lynx (1971). In this story there is a cat named Bella. Other stuff no doubt also happens. There were no children to survive these Hibberts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

August 23, 1941

Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she  accepted the post of  Principal of  N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely  argument  in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world.  A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper.  We have  this picture  of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne
Post a Comment
Read more

August 25, 1990

Watch enough old movies (pandemic anyone) and you can fill in this scene--- businessmen, sex, court corridors. This is the backdrop to a scene from Morley Callaghan's novel, The Man With the Coat , (1955), from which we quote: As a businessman, Singerman might say he couldn’t afford to be associated with an old fighter who was an outcast from a place where the best people went. “I won’t be an outcast,” Mike said so loudly that his own voice in the darkness startled him and he sat up in bed. Then he heard a cat in the lane behind the building. The window was open a few inches. The weeds that bothered his hay fever grew in the lane. Again he heard the cat dragging at the lid of the garbage pail. The lid clattered and rolled and he jumped up, slammed the window shut, then he clenched his big fists with the broken knuckles and stood in a trance for a long time. A more directly biographical account is Morley Callaghan's story of accompanying a lady friend to the coliseum one night,
Post a Comment
Read more

August 22, 1806

Jean Honoré Fragonard (April 4 1732 to August 22, 1 806) the famous French painter, whose art illustrated the lives of a gilded class, included cats occasionally in his scenes. We have some biographical context from the  National Gallery of Art : 'Fragonard was one of the most prolific of the eighteenth-century painters and draftsmen. Born ... in Grasse in southern France, he moved with his family at an early age to Paris. He first took a position as a clerk, but having demonstrated an interest in art, he worked in the studio of the still life and genre painter Jean Siméon Chardin (French, 1699 - 1779). After spending a short time with Chardin, from whom he probably learned merely the bare rudiments of his craft, he entered the studio of François Boucher ....1703 - 1770). Under Boucher’s tutelage Fragonard’s talent developed rapidly, and he was soon painting decorative pictures and pastoral subjects very close to his master’s style....Although Fragonard apparently never took cour
Post a Comment
Read more