BEST-SELLING BOOKS AND BONNY BABIES

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28836, 5 March 1959, Page 2

BEST-SELLING BOOKS AND BONNY BABIES

[By SUSAN VAUGHAN!

Evelyn Anthony, 30-year-old housewife and novelist, is the only woman I know who maintains a steady production rate of best-selling books and bonnie babies. In 1956, she wrote “Ann Boleyn” which won the £10,500 award presented annually by the American Literary Guild for the best historical novel of the year. In February, 1957. her first baby, Susan Hieana Mary, was born. By August, 1957, Miss Anthony had completed “Victoria,” a novel of Queen Victoria’s lite from the time of her accession to the death of Prince Albert. It also won the £10,500 award. And in March, 1958, her first son, Anthony, was bom. Since then the prolific Miss Anthony has written more than 50,000 words of another historical novel—about the first Queen Elizabeth. Now she tells me: “I am expecting another baby in June. Then I will have three children all under two-and-a-half.” How does a woman with small children find time to Write so much? Miss Anthony admits that she has help in her London flat three days a week to enable her to do research in museums and libraries. Even so her output is extraordinary. She can write at home with the children romping and roaring around her. She can leave her household chores and go straight into her writing without any difficulty. With her sixth book and a third child on the way, Miss Anthony might be expected to halt one of her production lines soon. But she says: “I want to go on writing and I want to have five children.” She says, however, that she would give up her writing if it pypr seriously conflicted with her family life. For she believes mothers should look after their children themselves, as tar as it h ’lt PO £ db appropriate that Anthony should be fond of writ" ing and interested in Royalty

Her grandfather founded one of the world’s most famous ink firms, and her husband, Michael Ward-Thomas, is a godson of the former Queen of Rumania. She is a tall, attractive, redhead who was educated at a convent school near London and then released into the wild, extravagant party life of a debutante. She went through the full social whirl, was presented at Court But always she wanted to write and her first short stories were snapped up by magazines. Then she read a biography of Catherine the Great and was excited by the idea of writing historical novels. She began with a Russian trlology of books and now her novels sell by the million in America, by the thousands in Britain. Her husband? He is a director of a diamond mining enterprise.