Sheila's early work produced between 1958 and 1970 were Elizabethan and modern novels written more or less alternatively. After that, and because she was now living in Bath, she became fascinated by the Georgian period and most of her plots were set in the eighteenth century or Regency. All her novels were pure fiction but they related to places and or situations from her own life. The two exceptions to this were Penelope Devereux (1966) and The Favourite Sister (1967) the theme of these was the life and times of Robert Devereux Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth the First's favourite, from the viewpoint of his sister Penelope. She called her novels light entertainment though she disliked the label "Romance". She stated that her books, despite having a central love story, had a definite plot generally independent of the love interest, a tangle of relationships, something to be achieved and a mystery solved in the last chapter. She said the plots came very easily to her what she found slow and difficult was the writing, that is, choosing the actual words to use.
