Andrews, Lucilla (writer) – Library
Lucilla Andrews (1919-2006) wrote more than 30 popular romance novels as well as her memoir No Time for Romance (1977). Her ‘hospital fiction’ often drew on her experience as a Nightingale nurse in London during the Second World War.
Andrews was born on the 20th of November 1919 in Suez, Egypt to an English father, William Henry Andrews, and a Spanish mother, Lucilla Quero-Bejar. Aged three, Lucilla went to an English boarding school in Sussex and spent much of her childhood away from her parents.
In 1937, Andrews began work as a military nurse, training at St Thomas’s hospital in London. Here she remained for much of the war, despite her nurses home once being struck by a V2 bomb in 1945.
Andrews married Dr James Crichton in 1947, and soon discovered him to be gravely ill with an unnamed condition. The couple had their only child, Veronica, in March 1949, four months before Crichton was hospitalised. It was in this period that Andrews began pursuing writing seriously as a way of supporting herself and her daughter during her husband’s illness.
She first sold a story in 1952, to Good Housekeeping magazine. She got a good price, 25 guineas, and was able to quit her job as a nurse and concentrate on writing. Two years later in 1954 her first novel The Print Petticoat was published. This was also the year Crichton died and marked the beginning of Andrews’ prolific output of romantic novels. She published regularly—sometimes using the pseudonyms Diana Gordon and Joanna Marcus—until her last novel The Sinister Side in 1996, when Andrews was in her late seventies.
Andrews suffered the death of her daughter Veronica Crichton, a communications adviser for the Labour party, in April 2002.
Despite the huge popularity of her romantic novels, many of her books fell out of print. However, she began to receive attention again late in her life. In 2006 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Romantic Novelists Association—for which Andrews was a founding member at its inception in 1960. In the same year, months before her death, an argument broke out in the British literary media about whether Ian McEwan had plagiarised from Andrews’ memoir No Time for Romance in his bestseller Atonement (2001) – an argument Andrews only engaged with to declare her disinterest.
She died in Edinburgh—her home since 1969—on the 3rd of October 2006.
The collection in the Library is close to a full set of Andrews’ published works. Several have personal inscriptions from the author to her daughter.
The collection was donated to the Library in 2015 by Baroness Hayter, who received the books from Lucilla Andrews.
Information about Lucilla Andrews’ life and work taken from the following source:
- Obituary written by Julia Langdon October 2006
- Obituary of Veronica Crichton (daughter) by John Underwood April 2002
MORE INFORMATION
The books are currently uncatalogued. Please contact specialcollections@reading.ac.uk for more information.
ASSOCIATED COLLECTIONS