Mary Burchell

Mary Burchell was the pen name of Ida Cook (1904 to 1986), a British romance novelist from Sunderland who wrote more than a hundred novels for Mills & Boon and, with her sister Louise, helped Jewish refugees escape Nazi Germany.

Ida and Louise Cook (1901 to 1991) held civil service jobs in London and shared a passion for opera. From 1934 they travelled to the continent to help Jewish people reach Britain, rescuing 29 people, largely paid for by Ida's earnings from fiction. Yad Vashem recognised both sisters as Righteous Among the Nations, and in 2010 the British government named them British Heroes of the Holocaust. Ida's first novel, Wife to Christopher, appeared in 1936, and between 1936 and 1985 she wrote at least 112 novels for Mills & Boon; Joseph McAleer's history of the firm puts the figure at over 130. Many were reissued by Harlequin. Her best-known sequence is the Warrender Saga, thirteen novels set in the world of opera and the concert hall. She helped found the Romantic Novelists' Association and was its second president from 1966 until her death on 22 December 1986.

For collectors

Her memoir We Followed Our Stars (1950, as Ida Cook), later reissued as Safe Passage (2008), is the book most sought for its account of the rescues. Fiction collectors look for the early Mills & Boon hardbacks from 1936 onwards and the Warrender Saga, many of which also exist in later Harlequin paperback editions.