Mary S. Lovell

Mary S. Lovell is a British writer, daughter of William G. and Mary Catherine (nee Wooley) Shelton; married (1) to Clifford C. Lovell, 22 October 1960 (divorced, 1974); (2) married to Geoffrey A. H. Watts, 11 July 1992; children: Graeme R. Lovell.

She has written biographies of Beryl Markham, Amelia Earhart, Jane Digby, Richard Francis Burton, Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, the Mitford Girls, Bess of Hardwick and The Churchills. Her book on Markham, Straight on Till Morning, researched and written in under a year, after weeks of interviews with the subject in Nairobi, became an immediate international bestseller when it was published in 1987 and was twelve weeks on the New York Times Best Seller lists.

She also wrote The Mitford Girls (titled The Sisters in the USA), a biography of the celebrated Mitford sisters, first published in September 2001 (paperback August 2002), and her Bess of Hardwick, was published in the UK in 2005. Four of her books are currently optioned for films.

Amelia, a major movie starring Richard Gere and Hilary Swank was based on her bestselling book The Sound of Wings - a biography of Amelia Earhart. It was released in October 2009.

Her last biography was The Churchills - a biography of the Churchill family from the Ist Duke Marlborough to the present generation,was published in April 2011 in the UK and May 2011 in the U.S.A. The paperback is due for release in April/May 2012.

She is presently finishing off her first novel, which is set in the early days of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

She lives in the New Forest, Hampshire and when not writing she travels extensively, mainly in the Middle East.

List of biographies by subject

• Beryl Markham - Straight on till Morning (1987)
• Beryl Markham’s African stories - The Splendid Outcast (1988)
• Amelia Earhart - The Sound of Wings (1989 & 2009)
• Amy Elizabeth Thorpe - Cast No Shadow; Women in WW II Espionage (1992)
• Jane Digby - A Scandalous Life (1995)
• Sir Richard Burton - A Rage to Live (1998)
• Mitford Sisters - The Mitford Girls – the extraordinary lives of the six Mitford sisters (2001)
• Bess of Hardwick – Empire Builder and First Lady of Chatsworth (2005)
• Winston Churchill - The Churchills: In Love and War (2011)

External links

• Mary S. Lovell's internet website
• Lovell, Mary S(ybilla) 1941 in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series (Highbeam Research

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