Author’s Blog

Alone in a Crowd: an Excerpt

The Defiant Daughter, the second of the Ashmead Heirs, has gone to beta readers. Here is a bit from early on. Lady Madelyn has been lured to London by invitations from her brothers and a plea from her stepson. She thought she preferred her solitude. She is beginning to realize she does not. ***** The […]

One Tough Lady

Did you know that Lou Henry was the first woman to graduate from Stanford with a degree in geology? It was the late 1890s. A degree was one thing. A job was another. She married a classmate who’d been offered a job as a mining engineer and went with him to China. She learned Mandarin […]

Another Year Older

On Friday The Defiant Daughter, lightly rewritten went to beta readers. Saturday dawned wet and very cold, and I lacked motivation to plunge into writing The Forgotten Daughter (though the first two scenes are in my head) nor to continue working on The Value of Pity. Early in the day, however, my daughter pointed me […]

Off to Bath

I travel. Sometimes I travel by boat, plane, or automobile. Sometimes I travel by book. This week I rambled through Bath with Ann Gracie. I’ve been here before, at least in books. I’m fascinated by the Roman Baths as I am all things Roman. I’ve taken the waters with elderly relatives and a dutiful companion. […]

Legitimacy, Appearances, and Pedigree: Hypocrisy Among the Upper Classes

Highlighting facts behind the fiction with Jude Knight and her Melting Matilda The premise of my novella Melting Matilda is that an earl, the head of one of the upper ton families, could not consider a mesalliance with someone of humble and scandalous birth. Certainly, those same ton families had many scandals of their own […]