Jean Plaidy

Jean Plaidy was one of the most prolific and well known historical novelists, who wrote   a large body of light fiction, mostly covering the royal families of England and Europe. However she was born in modest circumstances in Canning Town, East London in 1906.  Her birth name was Eleanor Alice Burford.   In spite of her coming from a very ordinary family, she had a good education.  Her family sent her to a private school, since health problems meant she could not attend school full time.   At 16, she went to a business college to learn to type... and then started work at various jobs, including selling gems in Hatton Gardens, and translating for foreign tourists.  
There is no biography for her, as yet, but photographs show her as an attractive young woman.  She was in her early 20s when she married Joseph HIbbert,   a man many years her senior, who had children from a previous marriage.   He was a businessman.  Her marriage was a lasting and happy one and it gave her financial security, to try her hand at writing.  She wrote several novels before she hit on something that sold and then began to write various types of historical fiction.  She used different pseudonyms, such as Philippa Carr for her “Daughters of England” series, and Victoria Holt for Gothic romances which she wrote in the 1960s.  She also wrote thrillers and crime fiction, but it was her Gothics and historical works that sold best.

Her first Gothic, Mistress of Mellyn, wove elements of previous novels such as Jane Eyre and “Rebecca” by Daphne Du Maurier. 
Plaidy had started off with serious modern novels, which were very long, but none of them attracted a publisher.  Gradually, as the 1930s progressed, she turned to more saleable works, including romantic fiction and light works.  She wrote 10 novels for Mills and Boon.  She was becoming a steady and successful writer.   In the 1940s during the War, she and her husband lived in Cornwall where she was able to write, and she lived near Plaidy Beach which gave her her most famous pen name. 
Like Georgette Heyer, Plaidy could claim to be the founder of a new type of historical novel.  Heyer invented the Regency romance; Plaidy was more general.  Many of her works concentrate on Queens of England or France.   One of the first of her books that I read as a teenager was “Murder Most Royal” which was a novel of Anne Boleyn and partly about her younger cousin Catherine Howard.    Later on, Plaidy wrote novels about both queens, using more recent historical research.   Like Heyer, she didn’t have a university education, but she was intelligent and a good writer and able to incorporate her research into her novels, without “dumping” it into the books, too much.  However, I get the feeling that she tended to rely on more conservative sources and at times too, she was somewhat anachronistic in how she perceived her characters, judging them from a modern point of view. She had a vehement prejudice against Henry VIII because of the “way he treated his wives”.

She was hard working and prolific as a writer, usually dedicating 5 hours a day to her work even in old age. She usually went on a cruise in the winter, as she grew older, to get away from the cold English winter.  She would work each day, for some time and then play chess.  
After her husband’s death – which was a great sadness to her, she settled in Kensington London, with a woman companion sharing her flat.  She used the large Kensington central library, with its collection of old books, for research, and was allowed to take books home and kept them as long as she liked. (A privilege I wish that I could have!). She still worked very hard, and produced 91 Jean Plaidy novels alone.
She died in 1993, on a cruise, in the Mediterranean, having had a long and successful life and writing career. I wish that there was a biography of her, and hope that one will come out soon.  Some of her work seems rather dated now, but she started me wanting to write and gave me my obsession with Anne Boleyn!