Barbara Metzger

Barbara Metzger (1944-2023) was an American novelist known for humorous Regency romances set in early nineteenth-century England. She was born in New Rochelle, New York, on 15 February 1944 and died on 21 June 2023, aged 79, after a long illness.

She graduated from Connecticut College in 1966, then wrote greeting card verse and spent the years to 1975 as an assistant editor, proofreader and copy editor, alongside work as an artist and craftsperson. She lived for most of her life in Montauk, on Long Island.

Her earliest listed novel, Bething's Folly, came from Walker in 1981, followed by The Earl and the Heiress (Walker, 1982), My Lady Innkeeper (Walker, 1985) and Rake's Ransom (Walker, 1986). In the 1990s she wrote for Fawcett, with titles such as Father Christmas (1995), An Enchanted Affair (1996), The Primrose Path (1997) and Miss Lockhart's Letters (1998), before moving to Signet with Saved by Scandal (2000), The Painted Lady (2001) and A Debt to Delia (2002). Her output came to more than three dozen books and about a dozen novellas. She admired the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer.

Her honours included a RITA from the Romance Writers of America, the National Readers' Choice Award, the Madcap Award for humour in romance, and two career achievement awards from Romantic Times.

For collectors, the Walker editions of 1981 to 1986 are her earliest books; her later Regencies came from Fawcett in the 1990s and Signet from 2000. Readers remembering her in 2023 named Lord Heartless, The Luck of the Devil and An Affair of Interest among their favourites.