Mariana Villa-Gilbert Author

Mariana Villa-Gilbert was born on 21 February 1937 in Croydon, South London. Despite studying art and sculpture, Villa-Gilbert wanted to be a writer. Her first novel Mrs Galbraith’s Air was published by Chatto and Windus in 1963. She published five other novels with the publisher over the next decade, My Love All Dressed in White (1964), and Mrs Cantello (1966), A Jingle-Jangle Song (1968), The Others (1970) and Manuela: A Modern Myth (1973). A short story collection, The Sun in Hours – the final published work in her lifetime – came in 1986. In the 1990s Villa-Gilbert moved to Cornwall and retreated from public view. She continued to write, however, and her literary papers – recently acquired by Special Collections at the University of Exeter – contain many unpublished manuscripts. Villa-Gilbert died in 2023. Lurid’s new edition of A Jingle-Jangle Song is the first republication of a Villa-Gilbert novel since the 1970s.