Charlotte Bingham

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Charlotte Bingham (born 1942) is a British novelist.

Bingham has sold millions of copies of her books. Before becoming a romance novelist in the early 1980s, she wrote two autobiographies, a novel, and collaborated with her husband, actor Terence Brady on scripts for television and the stage.

Bingham comes from literary antecedents. Her father, John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, was a writer of detective stories and a secret member of MI5, the British secret service. He served as the model for the character of spymaster George Smiley in the novels of John le Carre. Her mother, Madeleine, was a playwright.

Bingham's literary career began with a splash when her autobiography, which she published when she was nineteen, became a bestseller. Coronet Among the Weeds (1963) is a humorous account of the life of a teenage daughter of a lord. In it she describes trying on different poses - as a beatnik, as a debutante, as a secretary and typist, all with hilarious results. Mostly she is concerned with the overwhelming absence of worthwhile men (supermen) and the proliferation of "weeds, drips, and leches".

She said about it: "I turned to writing at the age of eighteen because of an inability to master the arts of shorthand and typing. The resultant humorous book . . . has been described as a book about being a debutante, which I no longer bother to deny, having too much regard for my royalties."

Bingham published her first novel, Lucinda, in 1966 and a second autobiography, Coronet Among the Grass, in 1972, before moving on to writing for TV and, later, romance novels. She won the Best Romantic Novel Award from the Romantic Novelists Association in 1996.