Dear readers,

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read. Beatrix Potter, Clare Turlay Newberry, Marguerite Henry, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Secret Garden—these and other favorites from my childhood still claim space in my overloaded bookshelves...and my overloaded memory.

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During adolescence I read Georgette Heyer, inventor of The Regency Romance, before discovering the REAL Regencies of Jane Austen. Today, I enjoy historical fiction from various eras, along with non-fictional history and contemporary fiction. But the English Regency period still speaks loudest to my imagination.

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ANNA'S REFUGE, my second Regency novel, begins a series centered in a make-believe town in the Yorkshire Dales called Wrackwater Bridge. Like the stand-alone LEARNING TO WALTZ, it revolves around family: the good and the bad, the love and the conflict. Some families breed LOTS of conflict.

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I will never achieve Austen’s level, but our writing is similar in at least one respect. Our stories are small, intimate. It’s not the politics and international upheavals that inspire me but the “real life” of history. My goal is an authentic feel for how everyday people lived and loved, how the differences of their time made them different than we are today…yet how much we remain the same.

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Then and now, the world needs all the happy endings it can get. I’m delighted to provide a few.

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