Lucilla Andrews, who wrote more than 35 works of romantic fiction and whose memoir about wartime nursing inspired parts of Ian McEwan's celebrated novel, Atonement, has died at the age of 86, news reports said.

Andrews died on Oct. 3 in Edinburgh of lung cancer .

Apart from her romantic fiction, which won her many awards from her peers, Andrews also published an academic biography of a leading Roman Catholic theologian, the Right Rev. Ronald Knox.

McEwan has publicly expressed his debt to her biographical memoir, No Time for Romance (1977), which gave a graphic account of her work nursing injured soldiers returning from World War II. The experiences of McEwan's character, Briony, closely mirror those in Andrews' book.

Andrews was a founding member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, which recently honored her with a lifetime achievement award.

In 1947, she married a doctor, James Crichton, but discovered soon afterward that he was addicted to drugs. He died soon after the birth of their daughter, Veronica, forcing her to become the family's breadwinner.

She returned to nursing, but wrote in her spare time and her first novel, The Print Petticoat, about the work of a wartime nurse, was published in 1954.

Many of her subsequent books were set in hospitals, leading the Guardian newspaper to crown her "the brand leader in hospital fiction."

Her last book, The Sinister Side, appeared in 1994.

Born in Suez, Egypt, where her father was employed by the Eastern Telegraph Company, later Cable and Wireless, Andrews was sent to an English boarding school from the age of 3.

From 1937-39, she worked as a military nurse and when World War II broke out she joined the British Red Cross and trained at St. Thomas' Hospital in London.

In 1946, she nursed Chaim Weizmann, later the first president of Israel, who was recovering from ophthalmic surgery.

She recalls asking him "how it must feel to be you, now you're founding a new state, a new world for your people. How does it feel?"

"Dr. Weizmann, his eyes still shaded, reflectively swallowed the final teaspoonful of his boiled egg and continued to reflect for some seconds. 'Troublesome, Nurse Andrews, troublesome.'"

Andrews is survived by her brother John; her daughter died from cancer in 2002. Funeral details were not immediately available.