Although Ken Ley had also been a journalist, immediately after the war he applied to join the Civil Service as an information officer, and he remained an information and press officer for the rest of his working life. The couple lived at first in Bristol, where their son Richard was born in January 1946, and then moved to London, to Highbury in Islington and then out into what they both called ‘the leafy suburbs’, to an area near both Pinner and Eastcote in outer north-west London. There they stayed for the rest of their lives, moving from one semi-detached house down the road to another, which was considerably larger. Their second son, Graham, was born in May 1951 after the move to the suburbs. Both sons recall the fact that during the 1950s there was no fridge, but a larder with a stone, that there was a coal-fired stove, and that in the winter there would be ice on the inside of the metal windows! But no one froze, because there were electric fires to take the edge off it all.

Alice ran these houses, and looked after the daily lives of her children, taking up what was – in that post-war period – the role of a typical suburban housewife with a husband commuting on the local Metropolitan railway into London, where he worked for many years for the central headquarters of the Post Office. There were the summer holidays, often on the beach at Weston-super-Mare in Somerset where Ken’s mother lived, a journey which became far easier with , first the hire, and then the purchase of a second-hand car, an old Ford Prefect. As salary improved, so did facilities, but perhaps the decisive change came when the younger son started school in the mid-1950s, and Alice found that she had more time on her hands.

These features were based on interviews with the author, and another one tells us that Alice had made an earlier attempt at a novel, but she regarded that as an experiment. Her routine was to deal with getting the children off to school and doing housework in the morning, and then settle down to two hours writing and studying. From another feature, we gather that her studies of social history helped her to research period details, and that ‘if an idea or an incident, or a phrase came to mind’ she wrote it down at once in a notebook, which could be covered in flour if she had been baking at the time! The novels were hand-written, and ‘revised two or three times’ before being typed by a professional typist. A long quotation from these early days, in 1960, summarises Alice’s writing method:

‘I plan the main lines of the story, but not in complete detail, because that would be too mechanical. I follow my main objectives, leaving myself free to use my imagination, and the development of events as they proceed. I find that one incident unexpectedly gives birth to another, that one idea germinates another idea, and so I can manoeuvre and use them without losing sight of the main story. In this way the novel becomes flesh and blood, intellect and emotion, lifelike, and satisfying.’

Alice’s Diploma in Sociology had been completed in 1962, and by 1977 she had published an astonishing thirteen novels: the full bibliography which continues to 1989 is given on other pages of this site. She joined the Romantic Novelists Association, and was Chair from 1971-73; she was also a member of the Society of Women Writers and Journalists.

Alice was undoubtedly drawn to teaching. She gave classes in sociology for a few years, and ran a highly popular class in creative writing for many years, both at Harrow College initially, where she had studied for her Diploma, and later at home when the college ceased the course. Several of those she taught remained close friends.

It is interesting to note that Alice’s grandfather, Thomas Chetwynd, and her father Fred Humphrey both wrote stories: Chetwynd was principally a poet, but also a children’s author, and her father wrote occasionally, at times with a slant towards crime themes. There can be no doubt that the major influence on Alice was Jane Austen, all of whose works she had already read several times over by her late teens. She became an enthusiastic member of the Jane Austen Society, and clearly loved that immersion in an earlier age, notably one of elegance. But she would also have read widely in more recent popular writing, and it is hard not to see some influence stemming from the tastes instilled in the reading public by Georgette Heyer. Alice enjoyed crime fiction too, although not of the hard-boiled kind, and after mixing romantic themes with intrigue, and exploiting the implications of ‘reputation’ - for both men and women - in her chosen period, she did launch in later years a new hero who solved crimes with the help of his adventurous niece; this series (the Anthea and Justin Rutherford saga) was how she ended her career.

Some of her novels go back from the Regency (strictly speaking, 1811-20) and the overlapping Napoleonic period into the later part of the eighteenth century, and she created one family whose fortunes she followed in a short series (the Eversley saga). Her novels were translated into a number of foreign languages, and keenly read in the United States, as well as Canada and Australia. Paperback and large-print rights were sold, and most recently the novels have undergone a revival in e-book form with Sapere Books, and are being read widely once again.

She outlived her husband Ken, who died in 1994, by ten years. Both her sons, Richard and Graham, have written books, and Richard’s trilogy of novels, Seven Crowns of Oscalidor, is now available in e-book form while Graham has published academic books on theatre, although he has also taken recently to writing children’s stories.