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Robert Neill was a British writer of historical fiction. He was born in Manchester, southern Lancashire in the northwest of England, the setting for his best known work, Mist over Pendle, a novelisation of the 1612 witchcraft trials in Pendle, Lancashire. He was educated at Lytham and Cambridge, England, where he read science (which he later described as a mistake). He became a research worker for the Scottish Marine Biological Association, a schoolmaster at Burton-on-Trent, and an Electrical Lieutenant in the RNVR during World War II. He was a professor of biology and zoology at Saint Paul’s College and lived in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, where he was on the management committee of the literary festival there, before returning to the northwest (where he preferred to live) and turning to writing full-time. He wrote historical fiction because of his interest in history and his critical reading of historical fiction when younger. He felt he could think of new ways of looking at plots and correcting errors in the details, but it was only later he felt he could begin writing historical fiction himself, beginning with Mist over Pendle. For the background of his books he favoured reading the original sources and contemporary documents and visiting the places, only using textbooks to trace the sources.

The books he wrote were:

• Mist over Pendle (1951)
• Moon in Scorpio (1953)
• Rebel Heiress (1955)
• Black William (1955)
• Hangman’s Cliff (1956)
• Song of Sunrise (1958)
• So Fair a House (1960)
• Wonder Winter (1961)
• The Shocking Miss Anstey (1965)
• The Devil’s Weather (1966)
• Witch Bane (1967)
• Crown and Mitre (1970)
• The Golden Days (1974)
• Lillibullero (1975)
• Witchfire at Lammas (1977)
• Devil’s Door (1979)

Note: In the United States, Mist over Pendle is known as The Elegant Witch, and Moon in Scorpio is known as Traitor’s Moon.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Robert Neill", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0