Barclay, Tessa

(British, 1928– )

Tessa Barclay, pseudonym of Jean Bowden, was born in Scotland and has worked in publishing and as a journalist. She is well known for her best-selling saga-style fiction. Typical of this is The Millionaire's Woman (1995), in which the heroine, Ruth Barnett, leaves her sheltered rural village for a more glamorous existence as secretary to a motor-racing driver. The novel is set in the 1920s and its dynamic is provided by a struggle between the hero's money-grabbing wife and the beleaguered heroine. In The Saturday Girl (1996), set in a Lancashire mill town in the 1930s, Libby, the heroine, is ‘adopted’ by a wealthy invalid who is also a renowned anthropologist.

Catherine Cookson, Emma Blair, Pamela Oldfield  SA