If you're a collector of vintage Grace Livingston Hill books, you may not realize that she published several books under another name—Marcia Macdonald. 

Before the internet made things easy for collectors, these books often went overlooked in their J.B. Lippincott first editions. As you can see below, Out of the Storm and The White Lady first editions list only Marcia Macdonald. Early reprints by Grosset & Dunlap list both names, with either Marcia's or Grace's name in parentheses, as you can see in the dust jacket from Found Treasure. As time went on, later reprints simply listed Grace Livingston Hill as the author to avoid confusion.

In case you didn't know, Marcia Macdonald is the maiden name of Grace's mother. Surely this was a loving tribute to her author-mother who passed away a few years earlier in 1924. If you've never read one of the books she wrote, look for Mrs. C.M. Livingston, the name she used on her own literary works. You can read more about her and take a look at her books on this page.

The Honor Girl 1927	Found Treasure 1928	Out of the Storm 1929	The White Lady 1930

There are a few reasons for this series of books.

Grace's publisher considered these stories more suited to a younger audience—still good enough to publish, but not for the audience her publisher counted on for regular readership. The books were contracted as "novels for girls" by J.B. Lippincott Company to be published under the name Marcia Macdonald. GLH readers would have no reason to wonder why the style and content had suddenly become simpler in these books.

Another possibility might just be that there were too many good stories for too short a time period. An oversaturated market can potentially hurt sales, so why not publish them under another name? It's happened before—think of Fanny Crosby, the famous hymn-writer. She wrote hundreds and hundreds of hymns, but many were published using one of over a hundred different pen names. The story goes that people just wouldn't believe that so much material could come from one writer, so they simply used one of the other names instead.

Despite their simplicity, many readers count them among their favorite reads!

Do you have original vintage dust jackets for any of these books? We're looking for GLH fans who will share high-quality scans with us. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. us for details.