Victoria Holt was a pen name of Eleanor Alice Hibbert, an English writer who also published as Jean Plaidy and Philippa Carr. Under the Holt name she wrote gothic romances, beginning with Mistress of Mellyn in 1960, a book set along the Cornish coast where Hibbert had lived during the war. For The Shadow of the Lynx, published in 1971, she spent time on the Australian goldfields researching the setting. Hibbert died in 1993, having written under many names across several genres.
