Margaret Pargeter

Margaret Pargeter (née Appleby; 10 October 1925 – 11 February 2023) was a British romance novelist. Between 1975 and 1986, she published 49 romance novels with Harlequin and Mills & Boon, including titles such as Hold Me Captive and Boomerang Bride. Her first full-length novel, Misconception, was published in 1997 by Scarlet.

Early life Pargeter was born Margaret Appleby in Northumberland, England, on 10 October 1925. Her father was a farmer in the Northumbrian Valley. She started writing in her early teens, always carrying a notebook in her pocket so she could write stories and poems between chores on Smallburn Farm. Although she did not win the romantic story competition, the editor liked her style and asked her to write serial stories. She died at home, aged 97, on 11 February 2023. Modleski identifies common tropes within Harlequin romances that are evident in Pargeter's work, including the "more or less brutal" hero whose brutality must be explained by the novel, as well as the heroine's latent "anxiety about rape and longings for power and revenge", underlying an apparent "desire to be taken by force". Bach notes that the heroine is suspicious of a sheik she meets who is "clean and literate", which runs counter to her expectations; ironically, when the hero's part-French lineage is finally revealed, this somehow redeems him in the heroine's eyes. Misconception (1997)