THEY’VE been wooing readers with their romantic fiction for a 100 years. Yet despite the undoubted success of Mills & Boon books in sales terms —130 million walk off the shelves worldwide every year — they are still frowned upon by “proper writers”. But these four North women are proud to be part of such a publishing sensation. And last week they were at a glitzy London party to launch a year of centennial celebrations for the iconic brand. York-based Pam Hartshorne — pen name, Jessica Hart — decided to join their ranks in order to fund her PhD in medieval history. Her bodice-ripping titles include Married for a Month, The Convenient Fiancee and Promoted: To Wife and Mother. This year she’s looking forward to the publication of her 50th book, Last Minute Proposal and reckons to have sold in the region of nine million copies since she first put pen to paper in 1991. Pam, who is often asked when she’s going to write a “real book”, is quick to defend the genre: “Putting Mills and Boon up against a great literary work is pointless,” she says. “It’s like comparing apples and oranges. People describe them as escapism as though there was something wrong with people wanting to inhabit a safe little world for a while.” Likewise Michelle Styles, of Haydon Bridge, in Northumberland, has found Mills & Boon writing a great way to earn a crust. Indeed Michelle’s own story reads like a Mills & Boon romance itself. Californian-born Michelle, moved to the North East in 1988 after meeting her husband, Mark, a lawyer who works in Newcastle, during an exchange visit to Lancaster university four years earlier. “The deal was, if he passed his Bar exams, I would quit my job in insurance and come to Northumberland.” Now lots of her historical writing is locally inspired, like Taken By the Viking, which is set on Lindisfarne at the time of the Viking raids. Jackie Baird, from Darras Hall, Ponteland, has been writing since she was an 11-year-old girl when she won first prize in the Nature Diary of the year competition at school. She began penning Mills & Boon romances when her two sons went to school and she was at home with nothing to do. She’d always enjoyed reading about “exotic men in exotic places” and thought she would try her hand at inventing some of her own. “My first novel, Dark Desiring, was published in 1988 and it was the greatest thrill of my life when I held the book in my hands,” she says. Since then she’s written dozens of others but she admits that over the last 20 years she’s had to adapt her style to accommodate the modern woman. “My first heroine, Helen, was a naive little thing who was very protected and lived a sheltered life. But a more recent heroine, Amber, is an independent, confident career woman making pots of money as a stockbroker. She’s looking for love on her own terms.” Sheila Hodgson, who originally hails from Dunston, Gateshead, is now Mills & Boon’s Senior Editor for Medical Romance, guiding authors who set their novels in GP surgeries and hospitals. According to Sheila, women readers continue to be wowed by a white coat. “They tend to be heroic characters who save lives. They are compassionate people we all look up to and medical settings tend to produce tense situations that pull people together.” Sheila says she was brought up with Mills & Boon. “My mother and grandmother read them when they were younger and so did I,” she says. “They are not designed to be serious in the sense of high brow literature. It’s meant to be an escapist read. They are involving stories that you can pick up and put down that allow people to escape from their every day lives and fulfil their romantic fantasies. But within that there’s some very good writing.” | 
