Bertrice Small

Small published Skye O'Malley in 1980 and helped invent the historical romance that publishers spent the decade selling: very long, very explicit, and structured around a woman who loses everything repeatedly and acquires more of it each time. Modern readers find the earlier books hard going, because forced seduction as a plot device was a convention of that market and she used it. She wrote around fifty novels across historical, explicit and fantasy lines and kept a large and loyal readership for thirty-five years. She lived on Long Island and died in 2015.