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Sheila Hardy
Non-fiction (Audio only)
Non-fiction (History,
Local History)
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The House on the Hill – The Samford Union House
of Industry: 1764-1930 (Self 2001)
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Tattingstone – A Village and its People (Self
2000)
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The Cretingham Murder (Self 1998)
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1804 – That was the Year… (Brechinset 1984)
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The Village School (Boydell/Anglia TV 1979)
Non-fiction (Life Studies)
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Frances, Lady Nelson: The Life and Times of An
Admirable Wife (Spellmount 2005)
Buy Now
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The Diary of a Suffolk Farmer’s Wife – 1854-69
(Macmillan 1992)
Buy Now
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Treason’s Flame – the Trial of Margery Bedinfield
(Square One 1995)
Buy Now
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The Story of Anne Candler (SPA 1988)
Biography
Sheila Hardy wrote her first historical novel at the age of 13.
Torrential summer storms forced the members of the 5th Ipswich Girl
Guide Company to seek refuge in the empty rooms of Wherstead Hall.
The exciting adventures of past occupants of the house with which
she nightly regaled her patrol were eventually written down and
shown to her English teacher who corrected her grammar and pointed
out that the historical period she’d used was all wrong for age of
the house.
Undeterred by her first ‘rejection slip’, she continued to write and
by the time she left the University of Nottingham in the mid fifties
she was ready to write ‘the great novel’. Several brilliant first
chapters never got further than that, and for the next ten years the
hectic life of an English teacher in Girls’ Grammar Schools in
London, Norwich and Dorset left little time for serious writing.
When she became a stay-at-home-mother, she tried her hand at plays
for the radio, short stories, magazine articles and romantic novels.
Some attempts were more successful than others. A stint as ‘literary
editor’ for a small publisher included everything from reading the
slush pile to ghosting. It also gave valuable insight into how
publishing works! So much so that when she felt a publisher would
not be interested in what she had written even though she knew her
readers would, she ‘went it alone’ and successfully turned
self-publisher.
The move back to Suffolk revived the desire to write about
historical subjects. Why try to make up fictional stories when there
were so many wonderful stories from the past just waiting to be
told. From her first success with The Village School, which was
really about the man who was headmaster for thirty years from late
C19 – early C20, to her latest work, the biography of Frances, Lady
Nelson, she has focussed on taking neglected people from the past
whose life story has something to offer today’s readers.
Research for her books often leads to travel to unusual places, the
most exotic being the West Indies for Lady Nelson. Her ex-sea-farer
husband – yes, he really was Captain Hardy – happily accompanies her
and has become an expert at removing lichen from gravestones.
Sheila, who has two sons and two small granddaughters, has always
taken an active part in the life of her village. She was for over
twenty years a School Governor as well as Local History Recorder and
she is still a long-serving member of the Parish Council. For a
number of years she broadcast regularly on Radio Suffolk and she is
much in demand by local societies for talks on historical subjects. |
