Amy Dora Reynolds


Amy Dora Reynolds, under the pen name of Mrs. Fred Reynolds, was a poet and author of crime and romance novels in the late 19th- and early 20th-century.

Biography

Amy Dora Reynolds was born Amy Dora Percy Williams on 6 October 1860 at Florence Villa on Inner Park Road in Wandsworth, Surrey. Her father was the popular Victorian landscape artist Sidney Richard Percy, a member of the Williams family of painters. Amy initially followed in her father's footsteps as an artist, and exhibited under her maiden name of Amy Dora Percy one painting at the Royal Academy and three with the Society of British Artists. Her brother Herbert Sidney Percy was an artist as well.
Although she showed promise as an artist, she became a well-known writer instead of crime and romance novels under the pen name of Mrs. Fred Reynolds. Between 1889 and 1936 she published 41 books, including an Idyll of the Dawn and A Quaker Wooing, both of which are autobiographical in part.
She married Richard Freshfield Reynolds, a pharmaceutical chemist, on 15 September 1886 at St. Michael and All Angels Church in Bedford Park, Chiswick. They lived in Headingley, Yorkshire, and had three children, Richard Frederic Reynolds, Dora Eldrid Reynolds and Kenneth Richard Reynolds. She was interned
briefly with her daughter in Italy towards the end of World War II, and died on 11 June 1957 at the age of 96 at Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria, Lancashire.

Publications

Novels