Donna Baker

Donna Baker is one of the names used by the English novelist from Gosport, Hampshire, who is best known as Lilian Harry; Open Library also records her as Donna Thomson and Nicola West, and she has written romances, historical novels and wartime sagas.

She was born and raised in Gosport, beside Portsmouth Harbour, one of four children, and spent nights in air raid shelters during the Second World War. After school she joined the Civil Service, then married a sailor and started a family. She has lived in Devon, the Midlands and the Lake District, and a 2022 Tavistock Today profile placed her at Whitchurch, near Tavistock, on the edge of Dartmoor.

Under the Donna Baker name she wrote romantic fiction, including the racing story Ride for a Fall, in which a young woman tries to prove herself as a jockey; Severn House issued it as a hardback in London in 1998, with a Chivers large-print edition in 2000. As Lilian Harry she wrote 18 novels of the Second World War, many set around Portsmouth, including Goodbye Sweetheart (1994), and later the Burracombe novels, set in a Devon village modelled on Meavy, among them The Bells of Burracombe (2006) and A Stranger in Burracombe (2007). Open Library notes two books on writing short stories and novels, and the 2022 profile credited her with about 80 books.

For collectors

The Severn House hardback of Ride for a Fall (1998) precedes the Chivers large-print edition of 2000. Because one writer stands behind all these names, collectors of her Lilian Harry sagas may also look for the Donna Baker books.