Charlotte Lamb

Sheila Holland, née Sheila Ann Mary Coates, was best known under the pseudonym Charlotte Lamb as a prolific British romantic novelist. Between raising five kids, she's somehow written more than 170 romances, romantic suspense novels, and historicals.

Her first novel under the name Charlotte Lamb, Follow a Stranger, was published by Mills & Boon in 1973. She also used the pen names Sheila Lancaster, Victoria Wolf, and Laura Hardy.

Sheila Ann Mary Coates was born in 1937 in Ilford, just before the Second World War in the East End of London. Her father worked at Ford's Dagenham factory, and she was educated locally at the strict Ursuline Convent.

Sheila attended the Ursuline Convent for Girls. On leaving school at 16, the convent-educated author worked for the Bank of England as a clerk.

She later worked as a secretary for the BBC European Service. While there, she met and married a political reporter, Richard Holland. A greedy reader of romance novels, she began writing at her husband's suggestion.

Charlotte Lamb wrote her first book in three days with three children underfoot! In between raising her five children, Charlotte wrote several more novels. She used both her married and maiden names, Sheila Holland and Sheila Coates, before her first novel, Follow a Stranger, was published in 1973.

Sheila was a true revolutionary in the field of romance writing. One of the first writers to explore the boundaries of sexual desire, her novels often reflected the forefront of the "sexual revolution" of the 1970s.

Her books touched on then-taboo subjects such as child abuse and rape, and she created sexually confident — even dominant — heroines. Charlotte Lamb was also one of the first to design a modern romantic heroine: independent, imperfect, and faultlessly capable of initiating a sexual or romantic relationship.

Her chef-d'oeuvre was The Long Surrender (1978), which centered on a heroine who was sexually abused as a child and who was afterward at odds with herself and her sexuality.

Known for her swiftness as well as for her skill in writing, Sheila typically wrote a minimum of two thousand words per day, working from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.

Her 115 novels for Mills & Boon sold more than 100 million copies, and she wrote a further 50 for other publishers.

Since 1977, Sheila has been living on the Isle of Man as a tax exile with her family.

Sheila Holland, aged 62, passed away on October 8, 2000.