Prefers Her Characters Single

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30955, 11 January 1966, Page 2

Prefers Her Characters Single

An English novelist visiting Christchurch, prefers her heroes and heroines single because she does not care to write about divorce and unfaithfulness.

She is Miss Bethea Creese, who is spending two months with her nephew, Mr N. A. H. Creese, the principal of Christ’s College. Miss Creese has published 14 novels. Only one deals with married life. She does not write “kitchen sink” stories and does not rely on sex to attract readers. Her books have been translated into Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and French and her first paperback is being published in America. All Miss Creese’s books are set in places she has visited. She makes it a firm rule never to write about a place she has not visited. Her pub-

lishers are keen for her to set one of her books in New Zealand, but Miss Creese has not decided if she will do so. “You have so many good writers,” she said. Careful about details, Miss Creese does a lot of research before she starts a book. She aims to make her books so interesting to her readers that they cannot put them down before the end. She finds the first chapter the hardest to write, but enjoys writing the rest of a book. She hates to part with the typescript. “That’s when the changes have to be made,” she said. Miss Creese always wanted to write and began by writing short stories. On the strength of these she was offered a job on the editorial staff of two magazines, “My Home,” and “Woman and Home,” where she wrote serial synopses and was in charge of checking fiction. During the war, she was put in charge of writing about all the jobs women were doing and later had a monthly careers feature. She retired in 1961, but continued her feature for a further two

As a result of this, the Bodley Head asked her to write a book in its careers series. It was “Catering and Domestic Science,” which took her nine months to write and was published last year.

Miss Creese is also a founder of the Women’s Press Club in London. Asked whether it would have been possible to write books without having another job, Miss Creese said it would have been very hard. Public and subscription libraries were the best customers for her kind of book and many of the latter were closing down. Things were better in the paperback field, however. Yesterday, Miss Creese met several Christchurch authors. Shortly, she and her nephew and family will travel in a caravan around the South Island.