Sheila Coates Holland

Sheila Ann Mary Coates Holland ( Coates; ), best known by her pen name Charlotte Lamb, was a British novelist. She signed her novels with her married and maiden names (Sheila Holland, Sheila Coates) and under the pen names Sheila Lancaster, Victoria Woolf and Laura Hardy. She was the mother of writers Sarah Holland and Jane Holland.

Biography Personal life She was born Sheila Ann Mary Coates on 22 December 1937, at Dagenham, Essex, England. As a child, she was moved from relative to relative to escape the bombings of World War II. She attended the Ursuline Academy Ilford, then the Ilford Ursuline High School for Girls in Ilford, Essex.

She worked as a typist-secretary at the Bank of England in London, from 1954 to 1956, and then as a junior researcher for the BBC at Broadcasting House from the 1956 to 1958.

In 1959, she married Richard Holland, then a Fleet Street journalist, later a sub-editor of The Times and a classical biographer. They had five children, including a set of twins: Michael Holland, Sarah Holland, Jane Holland, Charlotte Holland and David Holland. Her husband prompted her to begin writing in the early 1970s.

She died suddenly on in her baronial-style home 'Crogga' on the Isle of Man. She had been living on the island since 1977 with her husband and four of her five children.

Writing career She began her writing career as her married name Sheila Holland and as her maiden name Sheila Coates. In 1973 she signed Follow a Stranger as her most famous pseudonym: Charlotte Lamb, but later she used several other pseudonyms, among them Sheila Lancaster, Victoria Woolf and Laura Hardy.

Her first historical and romantic novels were published by Robert Hale and serialised in Woman's Weekly Digest. By the late 1970s, she was an established and successful author, publishing as many as twelve novels a year with Mills and Boon. That annual number rose over the next few years; by the late 1990s, she had published over 160 novels, most of them romances, others historical novels and romantic thrillers, achieving over 200 million sales worldwide. During the course of her career, she wrote for a variety of different international publishers including: Penguin, Collins, Fontana, Hodder & Stoughton, Hodder Headline and Simon & Schuster.

Her last novel, a romantic thriller published posthumously with Hodder & Stoughton, was entitled The Angel of Death.