Olive Norton
Olive Norton, born in 1913 in Sutton Coldfield, England, was a prolific author and nurse known for her contributions to the hospital romance genre. She received her education at King Edward's School for Girls and trained as a nurse at Birmingham Children's Hospital and Manchester Royal Infirmary. Throughout World War II, she served as a counselor at the Citizens' Advice Bureau and later became a columnist for various regional newspapers, including the Birmingham News.
Norton published her first novel, "Sister Brookes of Byng's," in 1958 under the pseudonym Kate Norway, and went on to write over twenty novels in this genre, often set in the English Midlands with plots reflecting her real-life nursing experiences. Her stories typically featured romantic entanglements involving nurses and often included elements of mystery. In addition to her hospital romances, she also published works under other pen names, such as Bess Norton and Hilary Neal, and ventured into mystery novels in 1961. Olive Norton passed away in 1973, leaving behind a legacy as a prominent figure in hospital romance literature.
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Olive Norton
Writer
- Born: January 13, 1913
- Birthplace: Sutton Coldfied (now Birmingham), Warwickshire, England
- Died: 1973
Biography
Olive Norton was born in 1913 in Sutton Coldfield, now a district of the city of Birmingham, in Warwickshire, England. A member of a family with deep roots in that region, she lived in Sutton Coldfield almost her entire life. The daughter of Frank Joseph Claydon and Amy Thickbroom Claydon, she was educated at the highly regarded King Edward’s School for Girls in Birmingham and went on to study nursing at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and the Manchester Royal Infirmary. In 1938, she married George Norton, known as Jock Norton, a childhood playmate who became an ophthalmic optician. They had four children, Euan George, Alix Elizabeth, Mary-Ann, and Priscilla. From 1930 to 1936, Norton held a nursing position as a sister in charge of civil defense in Nottingham, England, and during World War II, she was a counselor at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau.
In 1954, Norton turned to writing, becoming a regular columnist for the Birmingham News until 1959. For many years she also wrote a column for the Sutton Coldfield News and other regional newspapers. Norton’s first work of fiction, Sister Brookes of Byng’s, was published in 1958 under the pseudonym Kate Norway, an authorial identity she used for many subsequent highly successful hospital romances. Settings for these novels were generally the English Midlands, where she herself lived, and her material was based on her own experiences as a hospital nurse. Because of her background, her novels succeed in depicting a believable medical world, with much convincing detail with regard to the administration of hospitals and to medical procedures. Occasionally a mystery plot also surfaced in these stories, but more essential to her work were her romantic story lines. These typically involved a nurse who found herself torn between two suitors, with the less predictable of the two eventually winning her favor. Norton published more than twenty novels as Kate Norway.
Norton wrote another series of hospital romances under the pseudonym Bess Norton, beginning in 1959 with The Quiet One and ending in 1967 with The Night Is Kind. She wrote an additional eleven hospital romances under the name Hilary Neal, beginning with Factory Nurse, published in 1961. Having achieved a reputation as a highly accomplished writer of hospital romances, in 1961Norton published her first mystery novel, Bob-a-Job Pony, under her actual name. She published four additional mysteries, including The Corpse-Bird Cries, which featured a detective-sergeant on vacation in Wales, the favorite vacation spot of Norton and her husband.
Norton also contributed short stories and articles to various English magazines and is the author of Rose, a radio play published in 1962. She died in 1973. A successful mystery writer, she was perhaps most well known in her time as the leading practitioner of the hospital romance genre.