Denise Robins

Denise Robins (1897-1985) was a British romantic novelist, born Denise Naomi Klein in London on 1 February 1897, who wrote around 170 novels and was the first president of the Romantic Novelists' Association. She died on 1 May 1985 in Haywards Heath, aged 88.

She was the daughter of the writer K. C. Groom and the musician Herman Klein, and began as a journalist with D. C. Thomson before turning freelance. Her first novel, Sealed Lips, appeared in 1924. Mills & Boon first contracted her in 1927, and she became one of its most prolific and best-paid authors before moving to Nicholson & Watson in 1935. She also wrote for the stage, including the play Heatwave (1929) with Roland Pertwee. Much of her output was Gothic and romantic fiction, and she also published under several pen names, among them Denise Chesterton, Eve Vaill, Anne Llewellyn, Hervey Hamilton, Francesca Wright, Ashley French, Harriet Gray and Julia Kane. In 1960 she helped found the Romantic Novelists' Association with Barbara Cartland, Vivian Stuart and others, and served as its first president until 1966. Her books reportedly sold more than 100 million copies and were translated into fifteen languages. Her daughter, Patricia Robins, also became a novelist.

For collectors

Her early hardbacks for Mills & Boon from the late 1920s and early 1930s, published before her 1935 move to Nicholson & Watson, are the natural focus for collectors of interwar romance, together with her 1924 debut Sealed Lips. Because she wrote under at least eight other names, a complete collection means tracking the pseudonymous titles as well as those under her own name.