What do you think?
Rate this book
After a Famous Victory
A dramatic and moving story of the effect of the victory at El Alamein in 1942 - and the military and human aftermath on a Services Hospital in Southern England one year later.
- GenresWorld War II
192 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1984
About the author
Lucilla Andrews
85 books10 followersLucilla Matthew Andrews Crichton
aka
Lucilla Andrews, Diana Gordon, Joanna Marcus.
Lucilla Matthew Andrews was born on 20 November 1919 in Suez, Egypt, the third of four children of William Henry Andrews and Lucilla Quero-Bejar. They met in Gibraltar, and married in 1913. Her mother was daughter of a Spanish doctor and descended from the Spanish nobility. Her British father workerd by the Eastern Telegraph Company (later Cable and Wireless) on African and Mediterranean stations until 1932. At the age of three, she was sent to join her older sister at boarding school in Sussex.
She joined the British Red Cross in 1940 and later trained as a nurse at St Thomas' Hospital, London, during World War II. In 1947, she retired and married Dr James Crichton, and she discovered, that he was addicted to drugs. In 1949, soon after their daugther Veronica was born, he was committed to hospital and she returned to nursing and writing. In 1952, she sold her firt romance novel, published in 1954, the same year that her husband died. She specialised in Doctor-Nurse romances, using her personal experience as inspiration, and wrote over thirty-five novels since 1996. In 1969, she decided moved to Edinburgh.
Her daugther read History at Newnham College, Cambridge, and became a journalist and Labour Party communications adviser, before her death from cancer in 2002. In late 2006, Lucilla Andrews' autobiography No Time for Romance became the focus of a posthumous controversy. It has been alleged that the novelist Ian McEwan plagiarized from this work while writing his highly-acclaimed novel, Atonement. McEwan has protested his innocence. She passed away on 3 October 2006. She was a founder member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, which honoured her shortly before her death with a lifetime achievement award.
aka
Lucilla Andrews, Diana Gordon, Joanna Marcus.
Lucilla Matthew Andrews was born on 20 November 1919 in Suez, Egypt, the third of four children of William Henry Andrews and Lucilla Quero-Bejar. They met in Gibraltar, and married in 1913. Her mother was daughter of a Spanish doctor and descended from the Spanish nobility. Her British father workerd by the Eastern Telegraph Company (later Cable and Wireless) on African and Mediterranean stations until 1932. At the age of three, she was sent to join her older sister at boarding school in Sussex.
She joined the British Red Cross in 1940 and later trained as a nurse at St Thomas' Hospital, London, during World War II. In 1947, she retired and married Dr James Crichton, and she discovered, that he was addicted to drugs. In 1949, soon after their daugther Veronica was born, he was committed to hospital and she returned to nursing and writing. In 1952, she sold her firt romance novel, published in 1954, the same year that her husband died. She specialised in Doctor-Nurse romances, using her personal experience as inspiration, and wrote over thirty-five novels since 1996. In 1969, she decided moved to Edinburgh.
Her daugther read History at Newnham College, Cambridge, and became a journalist and Labour Party communications adviser, before her death from cancer in 2002. In late 2006, Lucilla Andrews' autobiography No Time for Romance became the focus of a posthumous controversy. It has been alleged that the novelist Ian McEwan plagiarized from this work while writing his highly-acclaimed novel, Atonement. McEwan has protested his innocence. She passed away on 3 October 2006. She was a founder member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, which honoured her shortly before her death with a lifetime achievement award.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 17, 2023
I'm grading Andrews' books against themselves, and I read this - one of her books which deals more with the reality of wartime nursing than romance - in quick succession with several others. I would have enjoyed it more on its own, I think; on the one hand the nursing details and wartime story here were very, very well done. It takes place at a hospital outside the city; the doctors and nurses have mostly been evacuated from their London hospitals, since it's safer for patients out here. Most of the patients on the ward are ex-POWs of the Italians, returned in prisoner exchanges. (Apparently they would choose their most gravely injured prisoners since there was no danger of them returning to fighting strength.) The patients are contemplating a return to life that they can't even begin to imagine; some of them are permanently in wheelchairs or paraplegic - in 1943, a difficult day-to-day life lies ahead of them. So much of this was really well done.
That said, Andrews descends to schmaltz a little too often.
The romance begins strong and then dwindles, which does sometimes happen with Andrews, but here I wish that she hadn't included an extra obstacle in their way - Rose Weston, our nurse heroine, is very very rich, while the doctor who loves her is more realistically "okay financially after some years of poverty" - given that there were already enough in place: their age gap, the fact that both had suffered loss of beloved spouses in the not-too-distant past, the difficulty of hospital gossip and interpersonal relationships in a small community. I found myself thinking, as I often do with modern-day billionaire romances, "is nursing patients in a small hospital really the best thing Rose can do with herself and her two million pounds?" Rose briefly wrestles with the ethics of how her grandfather accumulated that two million pounds but doesn't really do much more than briefly feel guilty about it, which didn't work for me. All in all a subplot that could easily have been removed.
That said, Andrews descends to schmaltz a little too often.
The romance begins strong and then dwindles, which does sometimes happen with Andrews, but here I wish that she hadn't included an extra obstacle in their way - Rose Weston, our nurse heroine, is very very rich, while the doctor who loves her is more realistically "okay financially after some years of poverty" - given that there were already enough in place: their age gap, the fact that both had suffered loss of beloved spouses in the not-too-distant past, the difficulty of hospital gossip and interpersonal relationships in a small community. I found myself thinking, as I often do with modern-day billionaire romances, "is nursing patients in a small hospital really the best thing Rose can do with herself and her two million pounds?" Rose briefly wrestles with the ethics of how her grandfather accumulated that two million pounds but doesn't really do much more than briefly feel guilty about it, which didn't work for me. All in all a subplot that could easily have been removed.
September 17, 2022
One of Lucilla Andrews' later novels about WWII and especially the London Blitz. Rose Weston is a widow, having lost her husband early in the war. She is now doing night duty in a small hospital outside of London where she meets J.J Arden, a senior orthopedist working in the same hospital who is also a widower having lost his wife to diptheria. He begins to find Rose interesting and she finds herself thinking of him, but there is a war going on; she works until exhausted and so does he and it is only towards the end that Rose mentions marriage. This book contained a lot--almost too much--of the histories of war torn soldiers shipped from the battlefields to recuperate at their hospital. I found that part overdone.
March 29, 2020
Early work
Not as accomplished as her later works. Starts out very disorganized, little character development. I think that here she's writing to get her own experiences out of her system. One of the later books was almost a rewrite of this one, with a character just like Johnny....
Not as accomplished as her later works. Starts out very disorganized, little character development. I think that here she's writing to get her own experiences out of her system. One of the later books was almost a rewrite of this one, with a character just like Johnny....
August 8, 2021
Like the author's other WWII books, this was very sad in places, and some of the scenes were harrowing. It was a good reminder of what soldiers and civilians went through during the war, and unlike a lot of British books and films set in WWII, the depiction of the "Yanks" was pretty positive overall, particularly in one of my favorite scenes in the book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 23, 2026
wonderful characters
You get to know many of the patients fairly well in this book, more than most others by Lucilla Andrews. I got quite attached by the end. Andrews brings day to day life on the job to life, especially in ww2, in a way that captures the imagination and makes you feel you really know.
You get to know many of the patients fairly well in this book, more than most others by Lucilla Andrews. I got quite attached by the end. Andrews brings day to day life on the job to life, especially in ww2, in a way that captures the imagination and makes you feel you really know.
February 12, 2011
This was a pleasant enough read but far too short. The characters were very two-dimensional and didn't elicit much emotion from me. The description of the bomb attack at Christmas just didn't feel very real. Glad to finish this with a very contrived ending of the doctor and nurse getting together - more like Mills and Boon.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews