Jane Aiken Hodge Passes Away. Prolific Historical Romance author

Jane Aiken Hodge: prolific author of romance and suspense novels

Literary reviews do not sell the sort of romantic fiction in which Jane Aiken Hodge specialised. “What sells,” as Martha Duffy observed in Time magazine in 1971, “is the author’s name on the jacket and that illustration showing a girl and a castle.”

As Jane Aiken Hodge’s reputation grew, her name on her book covers seemed to
become ever larger, and the flow of girls and castles a virtual flood.
Eventually, her publishers’ explanatory straplines were all but redundant
because devoted readers did not mind at all whether, with this particular
purchase, they were getting “A fiery beauty confronts conspiracy and romance as
Regency England slides towards revolution” or “Fierce intrigue and suspicion
wrap themselves around a young girl caught in the Portugal of the Napoleonic War”.

The author called them “my silly books”, but her trademark Regency romantic
suspense novels were reprinted regularly, translated frequently and, when out of
print, tracked down on Amazon by aficionados who then filed their own ecstatic
reviews online.

The books also crossed and re-crossed the counters of public libraries, to the
delight of Hodge, who was a campaigning member of the Writers’ Action Group
involved in getting the public lending right programme through Parliament.

Between 1961 and 2003 she published more than 40 engrossing, generally fast-paced titles, most of them romantic historical novels with an air of mystery and satisfyingly resolved endings.