Ethel M. Dell

It is difficult to talk about popular literature in the 1920s without talking about a particularly shy British novelist whom critics liked to hate with a passion but readers loved to read named Ethel M. Dell (1881-1939). So shy was she that she was never interviewed. But starting in 1911 she wrote over 30 popular romance novels and several short stories but remained quiet and almost pathologically shy. What the critics said didn’t seem to bother her for she considered herself a good storyteller – nothing more nothing less.

Dell whose father was a clerk grew up in a middle-class family and started writing at an early age. Her romantic stories which were said to be racy were set in India and other British colonial possessions. Her cousins would count the times she used the words: passion, tremble, pant and thrill. She worked on a book for several years but it was rejected by eight publishers. When it was finally published in 1911 it was entitled “The Way of an Eagle.” George Orwell in his novel “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” has his protagonist make several scathing attacks on Dell, reserving special venom for “The Way of an Eagle”. However, the book was incredibly popular and between 1911 and 1915 it had gone through 30 printings.

In 1922, Ethel married a soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Tahourdin Savage, when she was 40 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 and made a lot of money eventually producing about thirty novels and several volumes of short stories.