Ethel M. Dell

Ethel May Dell Savage (2 August 1881 – 19 September 1939) was a British writer, known by her pen name, Ethel M. Dell, of over 30 popular romance novels and several short stories from 1911 to 1939. 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. Dell began to write stories while very young and many of them were published in popular magazines. Here stories were mainly romantic in nature 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. 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. While readers adored her 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. In 1922, Ethel 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 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. Dell died of cancer on 19 September 1939, at 58. Less