Vic Pickup is the author of Lost & Found (Hedgehog Press, 2020), What Colour is My Brain? (co-written with Jules Whiting, Hedgehog Press 2022) and The Omniscient Tooth Fairy (Indigo Dreams, 2023). She has also edited Reading Poets: A New Anthology from Two Rivers Press. Vic is a postgraduate researcher, working in the Mills & Boon archives held in Reading University’s Special Collections. She is also the co-organiser of Poets’ Café Reading, a monthly poetry night which features a guest poet and an open mic.
This research explores the hidden lives of Mills & Boon’s mid-20th-century women authors using 70,000 archival letters. Despite selling millions of books, they faced stigma, wrote under pseudonyms, and often apologised for their work. The project reveals their cultural impact and repositions them as historically significant contributors to post-war society.