Berta Ruck

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Standard Name: Ruck, Berta
Birth Name: Amy Roberta Ruck
Nickname: Berta
Married Name: Amy Roberta Onions
Married Name: Amy Roberta Oliver
Primarily a romantic novelist, BR produced nearly eighty novels over the course of her writing career as well as large numbers of short stories. Her fiction focuses on young girls and love. She also produced an autobiography and four books of deliberately haphazard memoirs which pay loving tribute to Wales. Her career spanned all but about three decades of the twentieth century, during most of which she published an average higher than a book a year.
Charcoal portrait of Berta Ruck, circa 1920. She has short wavy hair and wears long rectangular earrings.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Margaret Legge
The facts that she writes about art students, and that she attended the memorial service for art professor Henry Tonks on 15 January 1937, suggest that she may—like the somewhat younger Berta Ruck , Gwen John
Friends, Associates E. Nesbit
Later friends included Laurence Housman , Marshall Steele , and the popular novelist Berta Ruck (whom Nesbit first met as a friend of her daughter Iris at the Slade School). Nesbit could be difficult as...
Friends, Associates E. Nesbit
The friends of EN 's last years, both old and new, included Marshall Steele , Edward Andrade , actresses Athene Seyler and Sybil Thorndike , and writers Noël Coward , G. B. Stern , Lord Dunsany
Intertextuality and Influence Barbara Cartland
As a young woman BC immersed herself in books by Ethel M. Dell , Elinor Glyn , and Berta Ruck , among others. Dell in particular had a lasting impact on her own writing.
Robyns, Gwen. Barbara Cartland. Doubleday, 1985.
58
Intertextuality and Influence Ethel M. Dell
Barbara Cartland , according to her biographer Gwen Robyns , developed a taste for the novels of EMD (along with those of Berta Ruck and Elinor Glyn ) as soon as she discovered the public...
Intertextuality and Influence E. Nesbit
It had already appeared serially from January 1905 to January 1906:
Briggs, Julia. A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924. Hutchinson, 1987.
242, 460
During the two years leading up to the appearance of this work in book form EN was often producing monthly instalments of...
Publishing Emmuska Baroness Orczy
This volume carried end-pages of publisher's advertisements for other novels including many by women: Ruby M. Ayres , Inez Bensusan , Marjorie Bowen , Richmal Crompton , Berta Ruck , and O. Douglas (sister of John Buchan).
Orczy, Emmuska, Baroness. Blue Eyes and Grey. Hodder and Stoughton, 1928.
end pages
Textual Features Pat Barker
The story begins with the ambitions and emotional entanglements of a small group of Slade School of Art students (two men, Paul Tarrant and the precocious success Kit Neville, and one strikingly talented woman, Elinor...
Textual Production Barbara Cartland
In later life Cartland made herself the custodian of the romance tradition by re-issuing a long list of her favourites—Ethel M. Dell , Elinor Glyn , E. M. Hull , Berta Ruck , and...
Textual Production Dodie Smith
Autumn Crocus launched what theatre critic Ernest Short called [a] Dodie Smith boom; in only six years, DS had collected earnings of £60,000 from her plays.
Short, Ernest. Theatrical Cavalcade. Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1942.
202
In 1934, Autumn Crocus was made into...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Q. D. Leavis
This book was conceptualized as a sequel to the dissertation of her husband F. R. Leavis , completed in 1924, The Relationship of Journalism to Literature: Studied in the Rise and Earlier Development of the...

Timeline

March 1911: The Idler monthly (launched as a sixpenny...

Writing climate item

March 1911

The Idler monthly (launched as a sixpenny magazine in 1892) ceased publication.
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
316-17

14 June 1911: The future Edward VIII was invested as Prince...

National or international item

14 June 1911

The future Edward VIII was invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle in Wales: the first such ceremony to be held in the Principality itself in modern times.
Ruck, Berta. An Asset to Wales. Hutchinson, 1970.
2-5

Texts

Ruck, Berta. A Smile for the Past. Hutchinson, 1959.
Ruck, Berta. A Story-Teller Tells the Truth. Hutchinson, 1935.
Ruck, Berta. A Trickle of Welsh Blood. Hutchinson, 1967.
Ruck, Berta. An Asset to Wales. Hutchinson, 1970.
Ruck, Berta. Ancestral Voices. Hutchinson, 1972.
Ruck, Berta. He Learnt about Women. Mills and Boon, 1940.
Ruck, Berta. His Official Fiancée. Hutchinson, 1914.
Ruck, Berta. She Danced in the Ballet. Hutchinson, 1948.
Ruck, Berta. Shopping for a Husband. Hurst and Blackett, 1967.
Ruck, Berta. Sir or Madam. Dodd, Mead, 1923.
Ruck, Berta. The ’Berta Ruck’ Birthday Book. Hodder and Stoughton, 1920.
Ruck, Berta. The Arrant Rover. Hodder and Stoughton, 1921.
Ruck, Berta. The Bridge of Kisses. Hutchinson, 1917.
Ruck, Berta. The Girls at his Billet. A. L. Burt, 1916.
Ruck, Berta. The Girls at his Billet. Hutchinson, 1916.
Ruck, Berta. We All Have Our Secrets. Hutchinson, 1955.