Betty Neels books

Anthologies

Baby Boom Reading Order

Collections

Dr Fforde Reading Order

Holding Out For a Hero Reading Order

Kids and Kisses Reading Order

Sealed with a Kiss Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

The Final Touch Reading Order

White Weddings Reading Order

Betty Neels (1909-2001) was born in Devonshire, England, and trained as a nurse at a London teaching hospital. During World War II, she worked as a nurse and was posted to the Netherlands, where she met and married a Dutchman. She lived in the Netherlands for many years before returning to England, and this dual life between the two countries became the foundation of nearly all her fiction.

She published her first novel, Waiting for Deborah, in 1967 at the age of 58. Over the next three decades she wrote more than 130 novels for Harlequin and Mills & Boon, most of them following a well-loved formula: an English heroine, often a nurse of modest means, falls in love with a distinguished Dutch doctor. Her settings moved between English villages and Dutch cities, and her stories were defined by warmth, gentle humor, and plenty of tea and good food. She kept writing until shortly before her death in 2001.

Many of the “series” listed on this page are not connected story sequences but rather Harlequin-branded thematic collections (such as Baby Boom, Kids and Kisses, and White Weddings) that repackaged standalone novels under a shared marketing label. Her actual connected series, like Dr Fforde and The Final Touch, are quite short. New readers can pick up almost any Betty Neels title and read it independently, which is part of what has kept her books in print and widely read more than two decades after her passing.