Dorothy Lucie Sanders (4 May 1907 – 17 December 1987), better known under the pseudonym Lucy Walker, was a prolific and successful Australian romance novelist.
Personal life Dorothy Lucie McClemans was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, on 4 May 1907, the second of five daughters. Her father, William McClemans, was an Irish minister of the Church of England. Her mother, Ada Lucy Walker, was from New Zealand.Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 18 (2012) After her parents divorced in 1928, her mother supported the family as a nurse and then as a Justice of the Peace.
A qualified teacher from Perth College (1928), Dorothy taught in state schools in Western Australia until 1936. She continued teaching later in London while her husband, Colsell Sanders, a fellow school teacher whom she married in 1936, completed his doctorate in education. They returned to Perth, Australia in 1938.
During her life, Dorothy was a member of the State Library Board of Western Australia, the State Advisory Board to the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and the Children's Court.
Her eldest son, Jon Sanders, was a well-known yachtsman who set a record in a non-stop solo triple circumnavigation of the globe. It was during this voyage that both of his parents died. Colsell Sanders died in 1986 and Dorothy Sanders died at Menora on 17 December 1987.
Writing career She began writing in 1945, producing articles, poetry, short stories, and later novels. In 1948 her first novel, Fairies on the Doorstep, was published. During her writing career, she published as Lucy Walker, Shelley Dean, and Dorothy Lucie Sanders. The London Daily Mirror named her "Australia's Queen of Romance". During the 1970s, several of her romance novels were serialized in Women's Weekly, bowlderized to meet the restrictive editorial requirements of the magazine.
As Lucy Walker, she wrote about 39 romance booksLucy Walker Bibliography over a thirty-year career. Popular in the United States and England, more than a million copies of her books were sold. Walker's romance novels were distinguished by their Outback settings.
Walker was an active member of the Australian Society of Authors and Fellowship of Australian Authors, and a member of the Society of Women Writers and Journalists, London.
In Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, Walker's romance novel The Loving Heart is used to illustrate that the traits of romance novel heroes "have been invented by women cherishing the chains of their bondage". Greer claimed the novel expressed a foot fetish and criticized the "infantile" heroine.
In an interview, Walker expressed her regret that the popularity of her romance novels detracted from her other novels and kept her from pursuing more serious writing. She said, "I am not unproud of Lucy Walker but I'll never really be sure of what I could have done without her...I used to think that if I had been given the chance I could have written The Great Australian Novel."
Bibliography Novels are listed by name of author and chronologically.
Dorothy Lucie Sanders Faeries on the Doorstep, 1948 Six for Heaven, 1952 Monday in Summer, 1954 Shining River, 1954 Waterfall, 1956 Ribbons in Her Hair, 1957 Pepper Tree Bay, 1959
Lucy Walker The One Who Kisses, 1954 Sweet and Faraway, 1955 Come Home, Dear, 1956 Heaven is Here, 1957 Master of Ransome, 1958 The Orchard Hill, 1958 Kingdom of the Heart, 1959 The Stranger from the North, 1959 Love in a Cloud, 1960 The Loving Heart, 1960 The Moonshiner, 1961 Wife to Order, 1961 The Distant Hills, 1962 Down in the Forest, 1962 The Call of the Pines, 1963 Follow Your Star, 1963 A Man Called Masters, 1963 The Man from Outback, 1964 The Ranger in the Hills, 1965 The Other Girl, 1965 The River is Down, 1966 Reaching for the Stars, 1966 The Gone-Away Man, 1968 Home at Sundown, 1968 Joyday for Jodi, 1971 The Mountain That Went to the Sea, 1971 Girl Alone, 1973 The Runaway Girl, 1975 Gamma's Girl, 1977
Shelley Dean South Sea Island, 1966 Island in the South, 1967
References