Ruby M AyresRuby Mildred Ayres was a British romance novelist who was considered "one of the most popular and prolific romantic novelists of the twentieth century". Ayres was born in Watford on January 28, 1881, as the third daughter of London-based architect Chrles Pryor Ayres and his wife Alice (née Whitford). In 1909, she married insurance trader Reginald William Pocock. She died on November 14, 1955, at the age of 74, of pneumonia and cerebral thrombosis, at her house in Weybridge, Surrey. She was cremated four days later in Golders Green, north London. Ayres claimed that she began writing as a teenager and was expelled at the age of 15 for writing what she characterized as "an advanced love story," but there is no evidence to support her claim. Her first tale was published in a magazine immediately after her marriage in 1909, followed by her debut novel, Castles in Spain, in 1912. She shifted publishing houses to Hodder & Stoughton in September 1915, following her first popular success, Richard Chatterton, V.C. (which sold over 50,000 copies in the first three years), and remained there until her death in 1955. Read More Read Less