Charlotte Lamb
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Charlotte Lamb (1937 - 2000) is the best-known pseudonym of Sheila Holland, a prolific and bestselling romantic novelist born Sheila Ann Mary Coates in Essex 1937. She attended the Ursuline Convent for Girls, leaving school with a few CSEs, later working as a typist at the Bank of England and then a junior researcher for the BBC at Broadcasting House. After marrying Richard Holland, then a Fleet Street journalist, later a classical biographer, she was prompted by her husband in the early seventies to begin writing.
Her first historical and romantic novels were published by Robert Hale and serialised in Woman's Weekly Digest. By the late seventies, she was an established and successful author, publishing as many as ten novels a year with Mills and Boon. That annual number rose over the next few years; by the late nineties, she had published over 150 novels, most of them romances, others historical novels and romantic thrillers, achieving millions of sales worldwide. She began her writing career as Sheila Holland, but later used several other pseudonyms, among them Laura Hardy, Victoria Woolf, Sheila Coates, Sheila Lancaster, and her most famous, Charlotte Lamb.
Her last novel, published posthumously, was entitled 'The Angel of Death'. She died suddenly in October 2000 in her Scottish baronial-style home 'Crogga' on the Isle of Man. She had been living on the Island as a tax exile since 1977 with her husband and four of her five children (Michael Holland, Sarah Holland, Jane Holland, Charlotte Holland and David Holland).
