page_title: Charles Garvice
section_title: Writing career
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Garvice / Biography / Writing career
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of She Loved Him (1895) by Charles Garvice (1850-1920)
context_page_description: Charles Garvice was a prolific British writer of over 150 romance novels, who also used the female pseudonym Caroline Hart. He was a popular author in the UK, the United States and translated around the world. He was ‘the most successful novelist in England’, according to Arnold Bennett in 1910. He published novels selling over seven million copies worldwide by 1914, and since 1913 he was selling 1.75 million books annually, a pace which he maintained at least until his death. Despite his enormous success, he was poorly received by literary critics, and is almost forgotten today.
context_section_description: Garvice got his professional start as a journalist. His first novel, Maurice Durant (1875), was marginally successful in serialized form, but when published as a novel, it did not sell well. He concluded it was too long and too expensive for popular sales - this early experience taught him about the business side of writing. He would spend the next 23 years writing serialized stories for the periodicals of George Munro, who later bound and sold them as novels. Titles included A Modern Juliet, Woven in Fate's Loom, On Love's Altar, His Love So True, and A Relenting Fate. Just a Girl (1898) was very popular in the US, and its success brought him attention in the UK - from then on every novel he published became a best-seller in England. By 1913 Garvice was selling 1.75 million books annually, a pace which he maintained at least until his death. Garvice published over 150 novels, selling over seven million copies worldwide by 1914. Just a Girl was filmed in 1916. According to Garvice's agent Eveleigh Nash, Garvice's books were as "numerous in the shops and on the railway bookstalls as the leaves of Vallombrosa." He was 'the most successful novelist in England', according to Arnold Bennett in 1910.
  In 1904, capitalizing on his wealth as a best-selling author, Garvice bought a farm estate in Devon, where he wanted to work the land in "the genuine, dirty, Devonshire fashion." Like the characters in his novels, he romantically dreamed of a life happily ever after, lord of a country manor. He wrote about it in his one non-fiction book A Farm in Creamland.
caption: She Loved Him (1895)
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