Thorpe, Kay

Kay Thorpe (born 1935) is a British author of 77 romance novels, now totalling over 21 million copies sold. She published her novels in Mills & Boon in 1968. All her novels have also been published under Harlequin Enterprises Limited. Over a period of four decades, she has produced a body of sensuous work that investigates heritage, family, class and love. Her forte is to encode the opposing reading within the classic Harlequin plot. A synopsis of the author that accompanies her publications notes that she researched the market for romance fiction before electing to write in this category. Her first book published in North America established her reputation as a gifted storyteller. She has a strong vital writing style. As her career graph began in the late 1960s, Kay Thorpe, along with Charlotte Lamb and others, was one of the first writers to explore the boundaries of sexual desire, her novels often reflecting the forefront of the "sexual revolution" of the 1970s. As such she was also one of the first to create a modern romantic heroine: independent, imperfect, and perfectly capable of initiating a sexual or romantic relationship. However, under Kay Thorpe's expert analysis, the modern romantic heroine had to re-evaluate her age-old perceptions of what constituted love and marriage: she had to accept love unconditionally without looking for security in marriage.