While her first published book was a biography of the Antarctic explorer Captain Lawrence Oates co-authored with Patrick Cordingley, later works have been predominantly novels – many of them for young adults – and comedies for radio and television, often with a literary or historical setting.[3][4] Limb's debut novel Up the Garden Path was adapted as a BBC Radio 4sitcom,[5][6] and subsequently broadcast on television on ITV.[7][8]
Other works include Growing Pains (a documentary about ageing), Hilaire Belloc, Cities (six programmes of literary anthology).[9] and the introduction to her Newnham contemporary Valerie Grosvenor Myer's biography of Harriette Wilson.
Under the name Dulcie Domum, Limb wrote Bad Housekeeping, a humorous weekly column in The Guardian's Weekend section between 1988[10] and 2001.[11] Collections of the columns, a feminist novelist's diaries of a rural idyll gone wrong, were published in book form. The books, reissued by Solidus Press in 2002, are listed below.
In 1989, as Dulcie Domum, she coined the term "bonkbuster", which is a play on "blockbuster" and the verb "to bonk", which is British slang for sexual intercourse. In 2002 the Oxford English Dictionary recognized this portmanteau, defining it as "a type of popular novel characterized by frequent explicit sexual encounters between the characters."[12] Limb commented on the honour, "It's an unexpected event. People keep telling me I've made my place in history, so I can die happily now."[13]
Personal lifeedit
Limb was briefly married in 1970, being the first of the five wives of the historian, Professor Roy Porter.[14] She was married to Jan Vriend, a Dutch classical musician, from 1985 to 1989.[2]