About Rachel
Inspired by Austen
It has been said that every writer must first be a reader, and I have always loved reading. As a young girl, I was fascinated by tales of fantasy such as Enid Blyton's Enchanted Wood and wrote my own magical adventures—always with a happy ending.
When I was thirteen, I read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for the first time. I fell in love, not only with Mr Darcy, but with the romance of the Regency period. Over the years, I devoured numerous Regency romances—some good, some bad—and half-wrote several of my own.
My own Mr Darcy
I met my Mr Darcy, Andrew, at Southampton University and it was most certainly not love at first sight. However, we did become friends and he soon became convinced that I was the girl he wanted to marry. I did not agree! I met someone on holiday, but he soon turned out to be a Wickham. Although this helped me to appreciate Andrew’s good points, I was still not in love.
We are both committed Christians, and so we decided to pray that one of us would change our minds. I never expected it to be me! I fell in love and have never fallen out of it.
The rest is, as they say, history. We have been happily married for 38 years and have four grown-up daughters and seven grandchildren.
Researching to write
Whilst my primary school teachers encouraged my story writing, my English teacher at secondary school squashed my creativity. History, not English, became my favourite subject, but for reasons I can't now fathom, I went on to study economics at university, and then trained to be an accountant.
But I never lost my desire to write stories, and after moving to Weymouth in 2010, I was able to pursue my dream of writing and publishing a novel. I knew I wanted to write a historically accurate Regency romance. However, I was aware that much of my knowledge of the period came from reading Regency romances rather than history books.
Jane Austen wrote about the world she knew—I had to learn about that world. I started to research the Regency period, and shared much of what I learned on the Regency History blog, as a resource for others.
As I became immersed in the history of the period, I soon realised that certain key figures like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, had died before the Regency had even started, and so I expanded my research to cover what is sometimes called the long Regency, from about 1780 through to George IV’s death in 1830.
All my novels are closed-door, faith-based romances, rich in historical detail, set in the long Regency.
