Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author
PENNY JORDAN
Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!
Penny Jordanâs novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.
This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordanâs fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boonâs most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readersâ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan âWomen everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordanâs charactersâ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelistsâ Association and the Romance Writers of Americaâtwo organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to womenâs fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelistsâ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
âI CANâT take you no further, lass, seeinâ as Iâm bound for Wicklethwaites Farm and youâre wantinâRawlesden,â the carter informed Marianne in his broad Lancashire accent, as he brought the cart to a halt at a fork in the rutted road. âYou must take this turning âere and follow the road all the way down to the town. Youâll know it before you gets there on account of the smoke from Bellfield Millâs chimneys, and then you keeps on walking when you gets to the Bellfield Hall.â
âWhy do you say that?â Marianne asked the carter uncertainly.
She needed to find workâand quickly, she acknowledged as she looked down into the too-pale face of the baby in her arms. A lone woman with no work and a baby to care for could all too easily find herself in the workhouseâas she knew already to her cost.
The rich might be celebrating the Edwardian era, and a new king on the throne, but nothing had changed for the poor.
âI says it on account of him wot owns itâaye, and tâmill anâ all. Thereâs plenty round here who says that he only come by them by foul means, and that the Master of Bellfield wouldnât think twice about ridding himself of anyone wot was daft enough to stand in his way. Thereâs one little lass already disappeared from these parts with no one knowing where sheâs gone. Happen thatâs why he canât get no one working up at the hall for him. No one half decent, that isâ¦â
âHe doesnât sound very pleasant,â Marianne agreed as she clambered down from the cart, and then thanked the carter as he handed her the shabby bundle containing her few possessions.
âI still dunno wot would bring a pretty lass like you looking for work in these parts.â
Marianne could tell that the carter was eager to know as much about her as he couldâno doubt to add to his stock-in-trade of gossip. He had already regaled her with several tales of the doings of those who lived in the town and the small farms on the moors beyond it, with a great deal of relish. Marianne suspected it was an enclosed, shut-off life here in this dark mill town, buried deep in a small valley between the towering Pennine hills.
Her large brown eyes with their fringing of thick black eyelashes shadowed slightly in her small heart-shaped face. The carter had referred to her as a âpretty lass,â but she suspected that he was flattering her. She certainly did not feel like one, with her hair damp and no doubt curling wildly all over the place, her clothes old and shabby and her skin pinched and blue-looking from the cold. She was also far too fine-boned for the modern fashion for curvaceous womenâthe kind of women King Edward favoured.
âItâs just as I explained to you when you were kind enough to offer me a lift,âshe answered the carter politely. âMy late husbandâs dying wish was that I should bring his son here, to the place where he himself was born.â