Tessa Barclay

Tessa Barclay is a pseudonym of the bestselling and prolific author Jean Bowden. For over half a century, Jean wrote short stories, novels and non-fiction, under a number of different pen names.

Jean was born in Edinburgh in 1920. She started her career as an editorial assistant, and later worked as a features writer on Woman’s Mirror and as assistant fiction editor of Woman’s Own. For many years she was an editorial consultant for Mills & Boon. She also wrote some novels for Mills & Boon, as Belinda Dell.

Tessa Barclay is probably the best known of Jean’s pen names. As Tessa Barclay she wrote a string of bestselling family sagas, including trilogies The Champagne Family Saga and the Corvill Family Saga, and the four-part Craigallan series. Her family sagas were meticulously researched and contained a wealth of historical detail, as well as appearances from famous real-life figures.

Jean Bowden lived in London for many years, and was president of Croydon Writers Group. She died, aged 96 in 2016.

Read Jean Bowden’s Nurses at War book, and her Tessa Barclay novels in exclusive ebook editions from Wyndham Books. Available now from Amazon.