Howard, Audrey

(British, 1929– )

Born in Liverpool, Howard turned to writing when her son left home, moving to Australia to work on her first novel. She now lives in Lancashire. She writes popular family stories, and The Juniper Bush (1988) won Romantic Novel of the Year award. Begin with her first novel, The Skylark's Song (1984), set in early twentieth-century Merseyside, and charting the life of beautiful slum-child Zoe who is adopted by the local schoolmistress but lives with the threat that she may have to return to the squalid poverty of the docks. The Mallow Years (1989) is a love-story set in 1830s’ Oldham and on the Pennine moors, and detailing the lives of destitute weavers and cotton-spinning mill workers.

Helen Forrester, Beverley Hughesden, Elizabeth Gaskell  JR