Harlequin’s Collection

About Author

Mary Burchell was the pen name of Ida Cook and published all her novels under this name from 1936 to 1985. Ida Cook was born on 24 August 1904 at 37 Croft Avenue, Sunderland, England. With her older sister (Mary) Louise Cook (b. 1901), she attending the Duchess' School in Alnwick. Later the sisters took civil service jobs in London, and developed a passionate interest in opera. A constant presence at Covent Garden, the pair became close to some of the greatest singers of the era; Amelia Galli-Curci, Rosa Ponselle, Tito Gobbi and Maria Callas. They also came to know the Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss, and it was through he that Cooks learned of the persecution of European Jews. In 1934, Krauss's wife asked the sisters to help a friend to leave Germany. Having accomplished this, the sisters continued the good work, pretending to be eccentric opera fanatics willing to go anywhere to hear a favourite artist. Krauss assisted them, even arranging to perform in cities they needed to visit. The sisters made repeated trips to Germany, bringing back jewellery and valuables belonging to Jewish families. This enabled Jews to satisfy British requirements as regards financial security - Jews were not allowed to leave Germany with their money. Using many techniques of evasion, including re-labelling furs with London labels, the sisters enabled 29 persons to escape from almost certain death. The Cooks' own finances were little precarious, and when Ida obtained a contract with Mills and Boon to publish her first novel in 1936, she left the Civil Service to write full time. As Mary Burchell, she became a prolific writer of romantic fiction. Her great popularity helped the success of Mills and Boon, and guaranteed substantial income after the war. For many decades, her writing supported her two passions: refugees and young opera singers. Her flat in Dolphin Square at various times housed homeless European families. In 1950, Ida Cook wrote her autobiography: "We followed our stars", and in 1965, the Cook sisters were honoured as Righteous Gentiles by the Yad Vashem Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Israel, thus joining Oskar Schindler among others. She helped to found and was for many years president of the Romantic Novelist's Association. As Mary Burchell, she wrote over a hundred and ten romance novels, many of which were translated, and her most famous work is "The Warrender Saga", a series about the opera world, full of real details. Ida Cook passed away on 22 December 1986 and her sister Louise in 1991.

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Books in this Series

#19

House of Conflict

Mary Burchell

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Alison and her cousin Lorna felt they had been very lucky to land themselves pleasant jobs as housekeepers to elderly Mrs. Storey and her family, in a beautiful house in the Lake District. Alison in particular hoped that now she might be able to trace Colin Marriott, who had walked so suddenly and mysteriously out of her life, but whom she knew to be living somewhere nearby. Find him she did, but to her mortification Colin explained - quite kindly, however - that Alison was wasting her time in thinking of him seriously, and then proceeded to fall in love with Lorna. But Alison had things other than Colin to worry about now, for she had gradually realized that not all the Storey family were as agreeable as they had at first seemed -- and that, in one of them, she had made a dangerous enemy.

#64

With All My Worldly Goods

Mary Burchell

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Leonora Culpane found herself transported from having almost nothing in her puse to the heights of unimaginable wealth. And even more incredible, a grim and unknown guardian had been given authority over her. Lora found it difficult to believe she was an heiress, but she would have traded every penny to have her father back! But, if the fortune brought with it excitement, pleasure and luxury, it also brought bewilderment, doubt, and - most astonishingly - real danger. Most important, can it bring lasting happiness

#99

A Summer At Barbazon / A Nurse At Barbazon

Kathryn Blair

4.0 (2)

Susan had come to spend three months on the coast of Portugal as nurse-companion to a Portuguese noblewoman. Her patient gave her no trouble, but her brother - the imperious Visconde Eduardo de Corte Ribeiro - was a different proposition, and she found him oddly disturbing. It was safer, she decided, to see him only as a stony-hearted aristocrat who used his charm to keep others in subjection. Safer, but none too easy.

#106

If This Is Love

Anne Weale

3.0 (1)

Jane Baron could hardly believe it when the famous photographer David Ransome "discovered" her working in her uncle's seaside hotel and whisked her away from a dull, quiet provincial life and set about training her as a fashion model. Within a few months, Jane found herself photographed, feted, and famous. She had risen to the top of the fashion world - Paris one day, Rome the next. The glamorous international playboy, Yves St. Cyr, was at her feet. But there was something hollow about Jane's new life - for the one man she really cared for saw her only through the lens of his camera....

#134

My Dear Cousin

Celine Conway

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Most girls would be delighted to have the opportunity to visit Africa, but Lisa was not much looking forward to the prospect - to the prospect, at any rate, of meeting her cousin Adrian again. It was seven years since they had met, but she still remembered how she had never been a match for his mocking self-assurance, his disconcerting arrogance. Perhaps, though, she told herself, he had changed, had mellowed since those days. But he hadn't, as Lisa found the moment she arrived in Rhodesia

#144

Hotel Mirador

Rosalind Brett

0.0 (0)

When the physiotherapist Sally Yorke left the Beckmoor Orthopaedic Home in order to look after a patient at Morocco’s fabulous Hotel Mirador, she found herself with more on her hands than she had expected. Not only did she find her patient, Mike Ritchie, in a defeatist mood, but she found that Mike’s cousin, the owner of the Mirador, the immensely successful Dane Ryland, was an autocratic man with an inclination to run other people’s lives—including Sally’s. Sally herself was not the sort of girl to let anybody run her life, and yet Dane was accustomed always to getting his own way. Who would win?