Fiona Hill
Fiona Hill is a pseudonym of Ellen Pall. On her website she writes that:
Ellen Pall first made her mark in the publishing world with the Regency romances she wrote under the pseudonym Fiona Hill; nearly ten years later, she won the respect of critics with novels published under her own name. She began her literary career after graduating from college, when her father agreed to support her financially for six months while she tried to write and sell a novel. Knowing that she could not complete a "serious" work of literature during that time, she determined to write a historical novel--specifically, a Regency romance. [...] In five months, Pall had finished her first book, which was soon published as The Trellised Lane. She hoped that her father would be sufficiently impressed to subsidize her work on a more serious novel. He was not. "Far from being moved to extend his literary patronage, he proudly, briskly, firmly and finally congratulated me on my good fortune in entering so congenial a profession, wished me luck and considered our joint experiment complete," she confided in the New York Times Book Review article. In order to support herself, she began another Regency. "Soon--alarmingly soon--writing Regencies was the only thing I really knew how to do," she confessed. The genre flourished, and "Fiona Hill" was soon promoted from paperback to hardcover. Pall, who was growing bored with her lucrative work, explained that "this meant my manuscripts had to be twice as long. Feeling like the girl in 'Rumpelstiltskin'--whose reward for having spun a room full of straw into gold was a larger room full of straw--I wrote on."
Ten years passed before Pall published a novel under her own name.
She no longer writes romances.
Books
- The Trellised Lane - Berkley, 1975
- The Wedding Portrait - Berkley, 1975
- The Practical Heart - Berkley, 1975
- Love in a Major Key - Berkley, 1976
- Sweet's Folly - Berkley / Putnam, 1977
- The Love Child - G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1977 / Berkley, 1977
- The Autumn Rose - G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978 / Berkley, 1979
- The Stanbroke Girls - St. Martin's Press, 1981/ Bantam 1983
- The Country Gentleman - St. Martin's Press, 1987 / Fawcett Crest, 1987
