The Queen of Romance

The first biography of the bestselling author and journalist Marguerite Jervis

During the course of her 60-year career, Marguerite Florence Laura Jervis (1886-1964) published 149 books, with 11 novels adapted for film, including The Pleasure Garden (1925), the directorial debut of Alfred Hitchcock.

In her heyday, she sold hundreds of thousands of novels; she wrote for newspapers, women's magazines and the silent movie screen; she married one of Wales' most controversial literary figures, Caradoc Evans. She was an actress, a theatrical impresario, and one of the most successful novelists of her time, but now she is largely forgotten.

Known variously as Mrs Caradoc Evans, Oliver Sandys, Countess Barcynska and by many other pseudonyms, who was she really?

Liz Jones has dug deep beneath the romanticised tale told in Jervis's own memoir to reveal what made this driven and determined woman and how she became a runaway popular success during the most turbulent years of the 20th century

This lively and compelling biography reveals how Marguerite Jervis dealt in both illusion and self-delusion, and deftly unfolds the ways in which this apparently indefatigable novelist and owner of two theatre companies adopted multiple identities and kept reinventing herself, from London's West End to West Wales. Angela V John

This eminently readable biography, meticulously researched, of the life and times of a largely forgotten but remarkable woman will now be her fitting epitaph.Lyn Ebenezer