Читать книгу Passionate Nights: The Mistress Assignment / Mistress of Convenience / Mistress to Her Husband - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 4

Dear Reader,

It was a standing joke between Penny Jordan and myself that we’d become a couple of Mills & Boon’s ‘oldest inhabitants.’

My writing career with the company began in 1975—the Golden Age—when the authors were free to go wherever our imaginations took us, except inside the bedroom, of course. The door to that was barely ajar in those days. Romance has always been a tremendously personal genre—a shared fantasy between author and audience, so whatever happened when the door shut was all in the mind rather than on the page, and possibly none the worse for that.

The dark, dangerous hero with a touch of cruelty about him was what the readers wanted then, and titles containing words like ‘Lucifer’, ‘Satan’ and ‘Devil’ added an extra, anticipatory thrill, as vulnerable but spirited girls were pitched against men who rarely took ‘no’ for an answer.

When Penny began writing for Mills & Boon in the early eighties, she was one of the leaders in demolishing the lingering sexual taboos. Her books, with their powerful alpha male heroes, immediately touched a chord with millions of women worldwide and she was a phenomenal success.

Penny was also immensely hard-working and prolific, partly because, as a shrewd North-country lass, she didn’t altogether trust her success, about which she was unfailingly modest. In addition, she was always generous and helpful to beginning writers, who came to regard her as a friend as well as mentor.

She will be sorely missed, so it’s good to have these tribute editions, if only to remind us all how marvellous she really was.

Goodbye, Penny love, and God bless.

Sara Craven