Jan Cox Speas

Jan Cox Speas was an American novelist and short-story writer whose historical romances joined close character work to carefully chosen settings. A graduate of Woman's College in Greensboro, she later returned for a graduate degree and taught English and creative writing at Guilford College. Bobbs-Merrill first issued My Lord Monleigh in 1956. It places Anne Lindsay amid political division in seventeenth-century Scotland, where loyalty, exile, and personal attachment shape the action. Avon followed in 1978 with a widely circulated paperback of the original edition. The novel belongs beside Bride of the MacHugh and My Love, My Enemy in the compact group of historical romances Speas published during her lifetime. Her writing career remained connected to Greensboro and the regional institutions where she studied and taught. That combination of teaching, regional connection, and historical storytelling gives My Lord Monleigh a firm place within Speas's work rather than treating it as an isolated period tale.