Introduction

Amy Roberta (Berta) Ruck (Mrs Oliver Onions) was an Indian-born, Welsh writer who wrote over ninety immensely popular romance novels between 1914 and 1967, in addition to short stories, four volumes of autobiography and a history of her mother’s family. She married the novelist Oliver Onions (1873–1961) in 1909.

Ruck was born in Murree, in the Punjab, to a colonel in the British army, and was the eldest of eight children. The family eventually returned to Wales, and Ruck was educated mainly in Bangor. Originally an artist, she studied at a college in Lambeth in London before gaining a scholarship to the Slade, and finally attending the Académie Colarossi in Paris. However, she soon discovered she had a talent for fiction writing and in 1905 her short stories began to appear in various popular periodicals, including Home Chat.

Ruck’s first novel, His Official Fiancée, which had previously been serialised in Home Chat, appeared in 1914 under the name Mrs Oliver Onions, as did her next three novels. It was only with Miss Million’s Maid (1916) that she thereafter signed herself Berta Ruck. During World War One, she became a popular romantic novelist with her subject, the lives – and romances – of ‘modern’ young women, set against a contemporary wartime backdrop, all of which provided uncontroversial, much-needed, escapist reading. Her fame quickly eclipsed that of her husband and she became the family’s main breadwinner – the Barbara Cartland of her day.

Ruck led a strikingly modern, independent life for the time, spending long periods away from home, travelling or researching for her novels. She was a campaigner for women’s health and freedom, and supported Marie Stopes’s liberal views on sex education and contraception. She also supported unconventional friends such as Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Rebecca West in their complicated love-lives. Always physically active, she enjoyed swimming outdoors well into her eighties, and her last novel, Shopping for a Husband (1967), was published when she was almost ninety.

[24 March 1922] [Letters 1928, 2, pp. 200–1]

[Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris]

March 24, 1922

What a letter you have sent me! If I could hope one of my stories had given you one moment of the happiness you have given me I would feel less at a loss how to thank you.