About

I have always had a love of books – when I was younger I would devour novels by Jean Plaidy, Norah Lofts, Victoria Holt, Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie, all three Bronte sisters and the wonderful Daphne du Maurier to name but a few. If asked what my favourite book is – I would name you three: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte; Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier; and Dracula by Bram Stoker. But the list could easily go on.

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I have an obsessive love for castles and churches much to my family’s dismay as I insist on going into any church or castle I come across. I have a passion for the second Earl of Essex, Robert Devereaux, since I saw Errol Flynn play him in Elizabeth and Essex co-starring with one of my favourite actresses Bette Davis. Talking of films, I dare you to watch The Vikings and not fall in love with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis – it’s in the runes!

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So, you would think my career would have been in writing or history from the start but you would be wrong. At school, I had a love for the Classics and should really have studied hard at my Latin to take up my place at Manchester University but I cannot even blame a teenage crush for my complete failure in my A ‘levels. I was just bored of school. I ended up in Investment Banking instead starting a salubrious career in the Telex Room and gaining the giddy heights of Regulatory Reporting!  But I did have an epiphany in my late 20s and decided to do my English A’ level at evening school.

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There, at East Ham College, I discovered E.M. Forster, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and many other amazing writers and I was on a mission. I progressed to Birkbeck College, where I did my BA in English, my MA in Renaissance Studies and my PhD in English. Into my world came Marlowe, Ibsen, Chekov, Arnold Bennett, Ben Jonson, and the incredible world of the Icelandic Saga.

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In 2012 I also started volunteering at the Tower of London – which I still do now – and an idea began to form. Norah Lofts, the author of my youth, had written a trilogy based around the history of a house and all the people who lived in it starting from the Middle Ages and ending in 1970s. As a reader you were the only one that knew its entire history, you knew why there was a wall put up, a fireplace demolished and it gave you an intimacy I really enjoyed. An idea formed in my mind: what riches the Tower could give you as a writer if you followed a family through the centuries….

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And now I have left the mundane world of banking, my imagination is ready to fly and Maude’s story can be told. Tower of Vengeance will be the first in my Tower series.

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P.S. My PhD, if you are really interested, is called: Unlocking ‘Cabala. Mysteries of State and Government’: the Politics of Publishing. The Cabala of 1653 was the first book of state letters to be published. Letters which were taken from the Tudor and Stuart courts and read against the backdrop of the Protectorate.