page_title: Eleanor Hibbert
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Eleanor Hibbert / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: St Peter's parish church, Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill, London W11, seen from the west from Stanley Gardens
context_page_description: Eleanor Alice Hibbert was an English author who combined imagination with facts to bring history alive through novels of fiction and romance. She was a prolific writer who published several books a year in different literary genres, each genre under a different pen name: Jean Plaidy for fictionalized history of European royalty; Victoria Holt for gothic romances, and Philippa Carr for a multi-generational family saga. A literary split personality, she also wrote light romances, crime novels, murder mysteries and thrillers under the various pseudonyms including Eleanor Burford, Elbur Ford, Kathleen Kellow, Anna Percival, and Ellalice Tate.
  In 1989, the Romance Writers of America gave her the Golden Treasure award in recognition of her significant contributions to the romance genre. By the time of her death, she had written more than 200 books that worldwide sold more than 100 million copies in 20 languages. She continues to be a widely borrowed author among British libraries. Her popular works of historical fiction are appreciated by readers and critics alike for their accuracy, quality of writing, and attention to detail.
context_section_description: Hibbert was born Eleanor Alice Burford on 1 September 1906 at 20 Burke Street, Canning Town, now part of the London borough of Newham. She inherited a love of reading from her father, Joseph Burford, a dock labourer. Her mother was Alice Louise Burford, née Tate.
  When she was quite young, her health forced her to be privately educated at home. At the age of 16 she went to a business college, where she studied shorthand, typewriting, and languages. She then worked for a jeweller in Hatton Garden, where she weighed gems and typed. She also worked as a language interpreter in a cafe for French and German speaking tourists.
  In her early twenties she married George Percival Hibbert (ca. 1886–1966), a wholesale leather merchant about twenty years older than herself, who shared her love of books and reading. She was his second wife. During World War II the Hibberts lived in a cottage in Cornwall that looked out over a bay called Plaidy Beach.
  Between 1974 and 1978 Eleanor Hibbert bought a 13th-century manor house in Sandwich, Kent that she named King's Lodging because she believed that it had served previously as lodging for English monarchs Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The house had carved fireplaces and a staircase from the Tudor period. Hibbert restored the house and furnished it opulently but soon found it too big for her taste and too far from London.
  She then moved to a two-storey penthouse apartment at Albert Court, Kensington Gore, London that overlooked the Royal Albert Hall and Hyde Park. She shared her apartment with Mrs Molly Pascoe, a companion who also travelled with her.
  In 1985 Hibbert sold King's Lodging.
  Hibbert spent her summers in her cottage near Plaidy Beach in Cornwall. To get away from the cold English winter, Hibbert would sail around the world on board a cruise ship three months a year from January to April. The cruise would take her to exotic destinations like Egypt and Australia, locations that she later incorporated into her novels. She sailed to Sydney aboard the cruise ship Oronsay in 1970, and the Canberra in 1978.
  Towards the end of her life, her eyesight started failing.
  Eleanor Hibbert died on 18 January 1993 on the cruise ship Sea Princess somewhere between Athens, Greece and Port Said, Egypt and was buried at sea. A memorial service was later held on 6 March 1993, at St Peter's Anglican Church, Kensington Park Road, London.
caption: A memorial service was held for Eleanor Hibbert in March 1993 at St Peter's, Notting Hill Anglican church in Kensington Park Road, London.
exif: {}