Pen name Ethel M. Dell Language English Period 1911–1939 Name Ethel Dell Ex-spouse Gerald Savage | Occupation novelist Nationality British Genre Romance Role Writer | |
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Born Ethel May Dell
2 August 1881
London, England ( 1881-08-02 ) Died September 19, 1939, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom Movies The Eleventh Hour, A Debt of Honour, The Top of the World, The Safety Curtain Books The Lamp in the Desert, The Way of an Eagle, The Bars of Iron, The Keeper of the Door, The Obstacle Race Similar People James Kirkwood - Sr, George Melford, Sidney Franklin, Maurice Elvey, Jesse L Lasky | ||
"Those Who Wait", by Ethel M Dell (1917)
Ethel M. Dell (2 August 1881 – 19 September 1939) was a British writer of over 30 popular romance novels and several short stories from 1911 to 1939.
Contents
Early years
Ethel May Dell was born on 2 August 1881 in Streatham, a suburb of London, England. Her father was a clerk in the City of London and she had an older sister and brother. Her family was middle class and lived a comfortable life. Ethel Dell was a very shy, quiet girl and was content to be dominated by her family. She began to write stories while very young and many of them were published in popular magazines. Beneath her shy exterior, she had a passionate heart and most of her stories were stories of passion and love set in India and other old British colonial possessions. They were considered to be very racy and her cousins would pull out pencils to try and count up the number of times she used the words: passion, tremble, pant and thrill. Pictures of her are very rare and she was never interviewed by the press.
Writing career
Ethel Dell worked on a novel for several years, but it was rejected by eight publishers. Finally the publisher T. Fisher Unwin bought the book for their First Novel Library, a series which introduced a writer's first book. This book, entitled The Way of an Eagle, was published in 1911 and by 1915 it had gone through thirty printings.
Her debut novel is very characteristic of Ethel M. Dell's novels. There is a very feminine woman, an alpha male, a setting in India, passion galore liberally mixed with some surprisingly shocking violence and religious sentiments sprinkled throughout.
While readers adored Ethel M. Dell's novels, critics hated them with a passion; but she did not care what the critics thought. She considered herself a good storyteller – nothing more and nothing less. Ethel M. Dell continued to write novels for a number of years. She made quite a lot of money, from £20,000 to £30,000 a year, but remained quiet and almost pathologically shy.
Marriage and last years
In 1922, Ethel Dell married a soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Tahourdin Savage, when she was forty years old, and the marriage was happy. Colonel Savage resigned his commission on his marriage and Ethel Dell became the support of the family. Her husband devoted himself to her and fiercely guarded her privacy. For her part she went on writing, eventually producing about thirty novels and several volumes of short stories. Ethel's married name is recorded as Ethel Mary Savage.
Ethel M. Dell died of cancer on 19 September 1939, at 58.