Ethel M. Dell

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Ethel May Dell (August 2, 1881-September, 1939) was a British writer of popular romance novels.

Her married name is recorded as Ethel Mary Savage. She was born in a suburb of London. Her father was a clerk in the City of London and she had an older sister and brother. Her family was middle class and lived a comfortable life. Ethel was a very shy, quiet girl and was content to be dominated by her family. Ethel began to write stories while very young and had many of them were published in popular magazines. Beneath her shy exterior, Ethel had a passionate heart and most of her stories were stories of passion and love set in India and other British colonial possessions. They were considered to be very racy and her cousins would pull out pencils to try and count up the number of times she used the words: passion, tremble, pant and thrill.

Ethel Dell worked on a novel for several years, but it was rejected by eight publishers. Finally the publisher T. Fisher Unwin bought the book for their First Novel Library, a series which introduced a writer's first book. This book titled The Way of an Eagle, was published in 1911 and by 1915 it had gone through twenty-seven printings.

The Way of an Eagle is very characteristic of Ethel Dell's novels. There is a very feminine woman, an alpha male, a setting in India, passion galore liberally mixed with some surprisingly shocking violence and religious sentiments sprinkled throughout.

George Orwell, in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, has his protagonist make several scathing comments about Dell and others (notably, Warwick Deeping) and reserves special venom for The Way of an Eagle.

While readers adored Ethel M. Dell's novels, critics hated them with a passion; but she did not care what the critics thought. She considered herself a good storyteller--nothing more and nothing less. Ethel M. Dell continued to write novels for a number of years. She made quite a lot of money, from 20,000 to 30,000 pounds a year, but remained quiet and almost pathologically shy.

Pictures of her are very rare and she was never interviewed by the press. She married a soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Savage when she was forty years old, and the marriage was happy. Colonel Savage resigned his commission on his marriage and Ethel became the support of the family. Ethel's husband devoted himself to her and fiercely guarded her privacy. For her part Ethel went on writing, eventually producing about thirty novels and several volumes of short stories. Her readers remained loyal and the critics simply gave up. Ethel M. Dell died of cancer when she was fifty-eight.