Anne Hampson
# Anne Hampson

Anne Hampson (28 November 1928 – 25 September 2014) was a British writer of over 125 romance novels in Mills & Boon from 1969 to 1998. She published historical romance novels under the pseudonym Jane Wilby. Although she retired in 1998, in 2005 she published two romance and a crime novel. She has written an autobiography entitled Fate Was My Friend.

## Early life

Hampson dreamed of teaching and writing when she was six, but due to the depression after World War II, she had to leave her studies at fourteen and begin making blouses for Marks & Spencer's. She left work when she married. She sold her sewing machine for £15 to the neighbour who later encouraged her to publish her first novel.

Later, when her marriage broke up, she had to return to work and lived in a mobile home in the village of Cuddington in Mid Cheshire. But, when Manchester University decided to trial older women she applied and graduated. She wrote articles about her travels in Greece and they were published in various education magazines. She also had an interest in fossils and sometimes went to the North Yorkshire coast to collect. Her first manuscript was a romance about Delphi where she had visited. This manuscript sat on a shelf in her mobile home until she showed it to Brice Burgum, a neighbour who said she should seek out an agent to get it published.

## Career

In 1973, she became a launch author for the new Harlequin Presents line of category romance novels. Harlequin Presents books were more sensual than the previous line, Harlequin Romance, under which she had been published. She was chosen to be a launch author because she, along with Violet Winspear and Anne Mather, were the most popular and prolific of Mills&Boon/Harlequin's authors.

