author
Lorna Rea
1897–1978
A British novelist of the interwar years, she is best remembered for Six Mrs. Greenes, a family novel that follows generations of women linked by one name. Her work has drawn fresh interest through modern reprints and Project Gutenberg, giving new readers a chance to discover her quietly observant style.
1 Audiobook
Six Mrs. Greenes
by Lorna Rea
About the author
Born Lorna Mitchell Smith in Glasgow in 1897, she later became Lorna Rea after marrying Philip Russell Rea. The National Portrait Gallery lists her as a novelist, and genealogical records connected with her family place her death in Westminster in December 1978.
A contemporary Time review noted that she wrote romantic stories as a child and studied at Cambridge under Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the influential critic known as "Q." That same review helps place her among the British women novelists writing between the wars.
Today, she is most easily known through Six Mrs. Greenes, first published in 1929 and now available through Project Gutenberg. The novel’s renewed availability has helped bring attention back to a writer who may not be widely known now, but whose fiction still offers an appealing glimpse of family life and social change.