Amenable Women, Mavis Cheek’s 13th Novel was inspired by her anger at the unfair treatment of Anne of Cleves by Henry VIII’s PR machine, but this is not a historical romance in the traditional sense of the word.

The story centres around Flora Chapman who is in her fifties when her husband dies in a bizarre ballooning accident. With her new found freedom, she decides to finish the history of their village that husband Edward had begun. A reference to Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife who he rejected for being ugly, captures her imagination as she begins to delve deeper into the life of this neglected figure. Meanwhile, in the Louvre, Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves senses the tug of a connection and she begins to tell the story of the injustices she suffered and just how she survived her marriage.

Mavis Cheek was born and grew up in Wimbledon. She received a basic state school education, failed her eleven plus (twice!) and was put in the B stream of a secondary modern school before leaving at sixteen with no qualifications. She worked for twelve years for the contemporary art publishers, Editions Alecto, starting as a receptionist and, as she learned more about modern art, moving to their gallery in Albemarle Street, where she worked with such artists as David Hockney, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield, Gillian Ayres. She left to go to Hillcroft College for Women from where she graduated in Arts with distinction and then began her writing career in earnest.

She moved on from journalism and travel writing to short stories before writing her first novel, Pause Between Acts, which was published in 1988 and won the She/John Menzies First Novel Prize. Since then she has written a further nine novels including Janice Gentle Gets Sexy, Aunt Margaret’s Lover, Mrs. Fytton’s Country Life, The Sex Life of My Aunt and Patrick Parker’s Progress, and their critical acclaim has led to commercial success.

Novels
Pause Between Acts (1988)
Parlour Games (1989)
Dog Days (1990)
Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (1993)
Aunt Margaret’s Lover (1994)
Sleeping Beauties (1996)
Getting Back Brahms (1997)
Three Men on a Plane (1998)
Mrs. Fytton’s Country Life (2000)
The Sex Life of My Aunt (2002)
Patrick Parker’s Progress (2004)
Yesterday’s Houses (2006)
Amenable Women (2008)