Cordelia Brackenbury

Cordelia Brackenbury is fifty-two and taught history for twenty years. She lives in a Georgian town she declines to name, and came to writing sideways, through a decade of reading probate records for pleasure: the wills, settlements and inventories in which the real lives of Regency women are hidden. She is dry, precise and slightly wicked about propriety. She writes Regency romance for readers who love the ballrooms and the country houses and want to see the period from inside its own rules. She holds that the Regency is interesting not because it was elegant but because it was a machine for controlling women, and she is bored of heroines who simply ignore the machine. Hers learn exactly how it works, and then work it.