In 1950 Roberta Leigh, her outfit completed with a splendidly elegant hat adorned with black osprey feathers, arrived at the offices of the Hutchinson publishing house in South Kensington, London. The 23-year-old was there to sell her first novel. Using one of her father’s old ledgers, she had begun working on In Name Only, a tale of loveless marriage, as a teenager in 1941. She had noticed that the place where women clustered in her local library in Prestatyn, north Wales, was around the romantic fiction shelves. So she rang Collins the publishers, who, having confirmed that love sold, added that their rate for romance was £1 for 1,000 words.
Hutchinson made a slightly better offer, a straight fee of £75. But Leigh, who has died aged 87, declined the proposal. What she wanted was a deal that included royalties. The company conceded defeat. Within four years Leigh was claiming to be the best-selling author of romantic fiction in Britain. For many years this was at the core of her creativity – “some people like to go to bed with a man, I like to go to bed with a manuscript,” she said – but her career embraced rather more. There was print journalism, magazine publishing – she set up the teen magazine Boyfriend, and a comic, Fun’n’Games – and notably there was her role in commercial TV, in an era when puppets were stalking a low-budget space age.
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