LONDON: As authors go, Penny Jordan was never a household name to rank alongside JK Rowling or Dan Brown. Yet she certainly had a phenomenal output, penning more than 200 novels in 30 years.
It made the writer, who sold more than 100 million copies, Mills & Boon’s most prolific author.
And records released last week show she left more than £1 million in her will.
The writer, whose real name was Penny Halsall, produced her works under several pen names, her career ending only with her death from cancer aged 65 last year.
Halsall made up stories as a child to entertain her sister. By her teens, she was an avid reader of Mills & Boon romances. After leaving grammar school, she worked in a bank and started writing in her spare time. Her first book, Duchess in Disguise, was published under the name Caroline Courtney in 1979. She used this pen name for a further 24 Regency romances published up to 1986.
With titles such as The Dutiful Wife, The Reluctant Surrender and The Sicilian Boss’s Wife, her books delighted her overwhelmingly female readership with tales of all-consuming affairs. – Daily Mail