Literary reviews do not sell the sort of romantic fiction in which Jane Aiken Hodge specialised. “What sells,” as Martha Duffy observed in Time magazine in 1971, “is the author’s name on the jacket and that illustration showing a girl and a castle.”

As Jane Aiken Hodge’s reputation grew, her name on her book covers seemed to become ever larger, and the flow of girls and castles a virtual flood. Eventually, her publishers’ explanatory straplines were all but redundant because devoted readers did not mind at all whether, with this particular purchase, they were getting “A fiery beauty confronts conspiracy and romance as Regency England slides towards revolution” or “Fierce intrigue and suspicion wrap themselves around a young girl caught in the Portugal of the Napoleonic War”.

The author called them “my silly books”, but her trademark Regency romantic suspense novels were reprinted regularly, translated frequently and, when out of print, tracked down on Amazon by aficionados who then filed their own ecstatic reviews online.

The books also crossed and re-crossed the counters of public libraries, to the delight of Hodge, who was a campaigning member of the Writers’ Action Group involved in getting the public lending right programme through Parliament.

Times Archive 1976 Interview: Jane Aiken Hodge

In her past is the horror in her father's life, when his father killed his mother and then himself

• Spun sugar and peril, 1978

Between 1961 and 2003 she published more than 40 engrossing, generally fast-paced titles, most of them romantic historical novels with an air of mystery and satisfyingly resolved endings.

There were also contemporary thrillers, a study of Jane Austen (welcomed by the Financial Times as “a book shot through with insight and good sense”) and a literary biography of Georgette Heyer, founder of the Regency romance genre, of whom Hodge said: “My own early books show more of a debt to hers than I like to recognise now.”

Hodge was enchanted with the reviewer who described her novels as having “all the lightness of Georgette Heyer, with an added substance besides”.

Jane Aiken Hodge was born near Cambridge, Massachussets, the second surviving child of the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken and his first wife, the writer Jessie McDonald, who were later to divorce. When Hodge was 3, the family moved to Britain, settling in Rye, Sussex, where a third child of the marriage, the future children’s writer Joan, was born. All three would become writers.

From 1935 Hodge studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, where a big influence was the Jane Austen scholar Mary Lascelles, and in 1938 she took a second degree in English at Radcliffe College, her mother’s alma mater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The war intervening, her stay in the US extended to nine years, and she married her first husband, Angus Smart, while there. She worked for the British Board of Trade in Washington, and then, newly divorced, as a journalist on Time magazine in New York, transferring to its sister journal, Life, in London in 1947.

Although it was not published until 1998, she started writing her novel Susan in America in the 1940s. Its heroine being a shy English girl studying at Radcliffe, it was obviously in some part autobiographical, and, with neither a Gothic castle nor a Regency heiress in evidence, its contemporary relevance was untypically powerful.

Back in Britain, she was introduced (by her father’s third wife, the painter Mary Hoover Aiken) to her second husband, the poet and journalist Alan Hodge. After their marriage in 1948, she read film scripts for Warner Bros while her husband edited the Men and Matters column of the Financial Times. By the time their second daughter was born, in 1953, he had become joint editor of History Today.