Susan Scarlett novels appeared in quick succession, particularly in the early years of the war, promoted to readers as a brand; ‘You enjoyed Clothes-Pegs. You will love Susan Scarlett’s Sally-Ann’, ran an advertisement in the Observer (5 November 1939). Both Sally-Ann and a fourth novel, Ten Way Street (1940), published barely five months after Peter and Paul, reached a hitherto untapped audience, each being serialised daily in the Dundee Courier. It is thought that others of the twelve Susan Scarlett novels appeared as serials in women’s magazines, but it has proved possible to identify only one, her eleventh, Pirouette, which appeared, lusciously illustrated, in Woman in January and February 1948, some months before its book publication. In this novel, trailed as ‘An enthralling story – set against the glittering fairyland background of the ballet’, Susan Scarlett benefited from Noel Streatfeild’s knowledge of the world of dance, while giving her post-war readers a young heroine who chose a husband over a promising career. For, common to most of the Susan Scarlett novels is the fact that the central figure is, before falling into the arms of her ‘Prince Charming’, a worker, whether, as we have seen, a Mayfair mannequin or beauty specialist, or a children’s nanny, ‘trained’ in Ten Way Street, or, as in Under the Rainbow (1942), the untrained minder of vicarage orphans; in The Man in the Dark (1941) a paid companion to a blinded motor car racer; in Babbacombe’s (1941) a department store assistant; in Murder While You Work (1944) a munition worker; in Poppies for England (1948) a member of a concert party; or, in Pirouette, a ballet dancer. There are only two exceptions, the first being the heroine of Summer Pudding (1943) who, bombed out of the London office in which she worked, has been forced to retreat to an archetypal southern English village. The other is Love in a Mist (1951), the final Susan Scarlett novel, in which, with the zeitgeist returning women to hearth and home, the central character is a housewife and mother, albeit one, an American, who, prompted by a too-earnest interest in child psychology, popular in the post-war years, attempts to cure what she perceives as her four-year-old son’s neuroses with the rather radical treatment of film stardom.

Between 1938 and 1951, while writing as Susan Scarlett, Noel Streatfeild also published a dozen or so novels under her own name, some for children, some for adults. This was despite having no permanent home after 1941 when her flat was bombed, and while undertaking arduous volunteer work, both as an air raid warden close to home in Mayfair, and as a provider of tea and sympathy in an impoverished area of south-east London. Susan Scarlett certainly helped with Noel’s expenses over this period, garnering, for instance, an advance of £300 for Love in a Mist. Although there were to be no new Susan Scarlett novels, in the 1950s Hodder reissued cheap editions of Babbacombe’s, Pirouette, and Under the Rainbow, the 60,000 copies of the latter only finally exhausted in 1959.