After being spotted in a ballet class there by a television director, she was cast as Dora, one of the Bastable children, in a 1982 BBC serialisation of E Nesbit’s children’s novel The Story of the Treasure Seekers. She acted at the Little theatre with Leicester drama society before starting ballet and drama studies at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London, at 14. Six years later, she appeared on stage as one of the Von Trapp children in a production of The Sound of Music (1976), staged by the city’s rotary club at the De Montfort Hall. When Lucinda was five, her father was transferred to Courtaulds in Derby, so the family left Northern Ireland to live in Leicester. Her mother, Jane (nee Cottham), and great-aunt had been professional actors, her grandmother was an opera singer and her great-uncle was chief lighting designer at the Royal Opera House. Lucinda was born in Lisburn, County Down, and spent her first few years in the nearby village of Drumbeg. “We would wait with anticipation for him to return, always with a gift from another exotic country.” “He cut a mysterious figure and myself, my mother and my sister really didn’t know what he did when he was away,” she recalled. This enigmatic figure was partly based on Riley’s own father, Donald Edmonds, a director of the textiles manufacturer Courtaulds, whose work took him on frequent trips abroad.
The Missing Sister, the final book in the series, published in May this year, follows the sextet on a search for another daughter adopted by the wealthy Pa Salt, whose death and burial at sea sparked their quest to solve the mystery of why he adopted girls from all corners of the globe. Then – with settings ranging from the Beatrix Potter-era Lake District, London Edwardian society and the Scottish Highlands, to Thailand, Australia, Spain, South America, New York and Kenya – came The Shadow Sister (2016), The Pearl Sister (2017), The Moon Sister (2018) and The Sun Sister (2019). The Seven Sisters (2014), a story taking Maia D’Aplièse from Lake Geneva to Rio de Janeiro, was followed by The Storm Sister (2015), embracing historical Norwegian figures such as Edvard Grieg and Henrik Ibsen. “I wanted to celebrate the achievements of women,” said Riley, “especially in the past, where so often their contribution to making our world the place it is today has been overshadowed by the more frequently documented achievements of men.”
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