Flora Kidd

Flora Kidd, née Cartwright (1926 in Liverpool, England – 19 March 2008 in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada) was a British-Canadian popular writer of over 70 romance novels in Mills & Boon from 1966 to 2000.

In 1949, she graduated at the Liverpool University, where she met Robert Kidd, her husband, with whom she had four children: Richard, Patricia, Peter and David.

She realistically exploits her time spent in Scotland in stories that are full of local color describing customs, manners and re-creating dialects.

Robert Burns Like her 1967 release Whistle and I'll Come, she sets up the hero and the heroine of When Birds Do Sing (1970) against the theme of John Keats' poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci" ("The Beautiful Lady without Pity").

Although "La Belle Dame sans Merci" opens with a description of the knight in a barren landscape, "haggard" and "woe-begone", it is the heroine Lindsay in When Birds Do Sing (1970) who shares such sentiment.

Sally from little seaside town of Portbride, Scotland finds her sib, a local expression best defined as soul-mate, in Ross since both share in the communion with surrounding moorland: Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying, Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how!

Here the arrival of Duncan coincides in Jan's imagination of the long-awaited return of a local hero whose last descendant, a young man, emigrated to Australia.

The plots for Gallant's Fancy (1974) and Enchantment in Blue (1976) also take off in the Caribbean Islands, indicating a period of writing that took Flora Kidd to the location of her novels.