Best-selling novelist who challenged Mills & Boon stereotypes

Sheila Holland, or Charlotte Lamb as she was known to her millions of readers, did much to dispel the anachronistic image that…

Sheila Holland, or Charlotte Lamb as she was known to her millions of readers, did much to dispel the anachronistic image that the Mills & Boon novel was full of alpha-male heroes - dashing, a little cruel - and heroines sweet as Snow White, who only came alive with a hard, passionate kiss.

Sheila Holland, who died on October 8th aged 62, was at the vanguard of creating the modern romantic heroine: independent, imperfect and able to initiate a relationship. The revolution she helped spearhead in the 1970s was that a declaration of love from the hero was not climax enough either for her novels or for her heroines.

Her 115 novels for Mills & Boon sold more than 100 million copies, and she wrote a further 50 for other publishers.

Born in Ilford, her father worked at Ford's Dagenham factory and she was educated locally at the Ursuline Convent. On leaving school she worked for the Bank of England, and later as a secretary for the BBC European Service.

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She married Robert Holland, a journalist on a local newspaper who subsequently became a sub-editor with the Times.

She began writing at her husband's suggestion; until then she had been a voracious reader of romantic novels by such writers as Kathryn Blair, Anne Mather and Jane Donnelly.

At that time she was living in Felixstowe with her three children and wrote her first book, Love in a Mist, for the publishers Robert Hale in three days. She wrote a few more for Hale (under both her married name and maiden name - Sheila Coates) before her first novel as Charlotte Lamb, Follow a Stranger, was published by Mills & Boon in 1973.

She wrote swiftly, from nine o'clock in the morning in her office overlooking the woods and the sea - a minimum of 2,000 words a day. At her peak in the 1970s, she would sometimes find herself driven to write, turning out 12,000 words in a day, sitting up all night, or at the kitchen table with her children (now five with the arrival of twins), crawling around her feet. A novel could be finished in four days.

Her skill was a naturally strong literary sense with structure and plotting, and an ability to write the kind of novel that she would want to buy. She wrote about powerful and sometimes darkly intense emotions. Charlotte Lamb was at the forefront of stories that went "beyond the bedroom door", a trend that started in a new generation of Mills & Boon writers as a reflection of society's sexual explorations in the radical years of the 1970s.

Her classic was The Long Surrender (1978), which centred on a heroine who was sexually abused as a child and who was subsequently at odds with herself and her sexuality. It was a theme her novels returned to again and again: the heroine who would run away from her feelings and desires rather than confront them. It was the job of Charlotte Lamb's heroes to help the heroine understand and come to terms with her desires.

She was fascinated by the darker side of human nature and especially in finding the trigger that would push her characters over the edge. In her Mills & Boon novels she walked a fine line, her heroes often on the verge of losing control. Her understanding of the dynamics of passion always kept them just on the right side, but they often went to limits other authors never dared approach.

This was an area that Charlotte Lamb explored more freely in her novels outside Mills & Boon, most notably in A Violation (1983), the story of a woman's traumatic life after she was raped by an intruder; and her later novels, In the Still of the Night (1995), Walking in Darkness (1996), Deep and Silent Waters (1998), Treasons of the Heart (1999) and the recently published Angel of Death (2000) were classified as romantic suspense thrillers.

In the 1980s, Charlotte Lamb, who had by then moved to the Isle of Man, continued to write historical novels under the names Sheila Lancaster and Laura Hardy, and to push the boundaries of Mills & Boon's quiet and critically unnoticed exploration of forbidden passions and ardour.

Her "Sins" series, for example, examined each of the seven deadly sins in a romantic context, charting the conflicts in relationships that struggled to survive against the odds.

To a whole generation of modern readers, Charlotte Lamb was a secret best-seller who proved that romance was not all cooing doves, and she was true to this to the end. Her final novel, enticingly entitled The Boss's Virgin, is due to be published in July.

Sheila Ann Mary Holland: born 1937; died, October 2000