Jean S. MacLeod

Born Jane Sutherland MacLeod on 20 January 1908 in Glasgow, Scotland,[1] the daughter of Elizabeth Allen and John MacLeod. She was actually named Jane, but her grandfather complained it was not Scottish enough, and it was changed to Jean. Her father, who was a civil engineer, moved her family with jobs. Her education began at Bearsden Academy, continued in Swansea and ended in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.[2]

She worked in a sweet shop. She moved to North Yorkshire, England to marry with Major Lionel Walton on 1 January 1935,[3] an electricity board executive, who died in 1995.[2] They had a son, David Walton, who died two years before her. She died on 11 April 2011 in Yorkshire, England, at 103 years of age.

MacLeod started writing stories for the magazine The People's Friend, before sold her first romance novel in 1936. She wrote contemporary romances, most of them were set in her native Scotland, or in exotic places like Spain or Caribbean, places that she normally visited for documented. From 1948 to 1965, she also published under the pseudonym of Catherine Airlie. She was the first author published in the Mills & Boon Romance Series.

MacLeod was member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, where she met the mediatic writer Barbara Cartland, who was not too friendly.