All her life Melanie had worked with her father, Richard Lawrence, in the family firm of R. Lawrence & Son. There was no son, and sometimes Melanie wondered wryly why one never saw the sign and Daughter.
She used to sign her novels her married name, Hilda Nickson, her birth name, Hilda Pressley, and the pseudonym Hilary Preston. She published her first novels at Herbert Jenkins at 1950s, before start to work to Mills & Boon, most of her novels were reedited by Harlequin, in some cases by diferents titles. She focused her first novels on the popular Doctor-Nurse romances, and are frecuently found love triangles in her plots, and she also set her novels in exotic places like Italy or Spain.
Hilda Pressley Nickson served as Vice-President for the Romantic Novelists' Association. She passed away in 1977.