By 1937 Noel was turning her thoughts towards Hollywood, with the hope of gaining work as a scriptwriter, and sometime that year, before setting sail for what proved to be a short, unfruitful trip, she entered, as ‘Susan Scarlett’, into a contract with the publishing firm of Hodder and Stoughton. The advance of £50 she received, against a novel entitled Peter and Paul, may even have helped finance her visit. However, the Hodder costing ledger makes clear that this novel was not delivered when expected, so that in January 1939 it was with Clothes-Pegs that Susan Scarlett made her debut. For both this and Peter and Paul (January 1940) Noel drew on her experience of occasional employment as a model in a fashion house, work for which, as she later explained, tall, thin actresses were much in demand in the 1920s.

Both Clothes-Pegs and Peter and Paul have as their settings Mayfair modiste establishments (Hanover Square and Bruton Street respectively), while the second Susan Scarlett novel, Sally-Ann (October 1939) is set in a beauty salon in nearby Dover Street. Noel was clearly familiar with establishments such as this, having, under her stage name ‘Noelle Sonning’, been photographed to advertise in The Sphere (22 November 1924) the skills of M. Emile of Conduit Street who had ‘strongly waved and fluffed her hair to give a “bobbed” effect’. Sally-Ann and Clothes-Pegs both feature a lovely, young, lower-class ‘Cinderella’, who, despite living with her family in, respectively, Chelsea (the rougher part) and suburban ‘Coulsden’ (by which may, or may not, be meant Coulsdon in the Croydon area, south of London), meets, through her Mayfair employment, an upper-class ‘Prince Charming’. The theme is varied in Peter and Paul for, in this case, twins Pauline and Petronella are, in the words of the reviewer in the Birmingham Gazette (5 February 1940), ‘launched into the world with jobs in a London fashion shop after a childhood hedged, as it were, by the vicarage privet’. As we have seen, the trajectory from staid vicarage to glamorous Mayfair, with, for one twin, a further move onwards to Hollywood, was to have been the subject of Susan Scarlett’s debut, but perhaps it was felt that her initial readership might more readily identify with a heroine who began the journey to a fairy-tale destiny from an address such as ‘110 Mercia Lane, Coulsden’.