And finally, to Eric — you already have my heart, but now you have my eternal gratitude for your patience, your strength, your insight, and your love. This book would not exist without you.  

about the author

As the daughter of a former British spy and a jet-setting Italian who met in Paris and lived, at one point or another, in Rome, London, San Francisco, and New York, I feel that I should tell you that I'm a real-life Lara Croft who spends her days haggling in the bazaars of Morocco, shopping on the Champs-Élysées, riding a motorbike across the Gobi desert, and scaling ancient Mayan temples.

Unfortunately for all of us, however, that would be a gross untruth. My parents settled down in Rhode Island long before I was born and left me little choice but to turn to books to find my own romance and adventure. And turn to books I did. When I was in elementary school, I must have read Roald Dahl's entire catalog five or six times, I was addicted to The Baby-sitters Club, and I can vividly remember reading Judy Blume and feeling like I had finally found someone who understood me.

By high school, thanks to my older (and much wiser) sister, I was thoroughly obsessed with historical fiction. I would become enamored of whole eras and read anything and everything I could get my hands on that related to them. I went through phases — the Civil War, medieval England, the Vikings, the Italian Renaissance.

Then I found Jane Austen. And I was hooked. Here was an author (a woman, no less!) who went against everything that had been written before and who birthed a genre of literature. She cast aside the melodramatic gothic romance that had dominated "literature for women" for decades and that the Bronte sisters (whom I could never quite stomach) would eventually canonize, and instead made romance fun... and funny... and real. Austen's heroines were cheeky and ironic, her heroes dark and brooding and arrogant to a fault. The combination of the two, for the teenager I was then and the twenty-something I am now, was electric.

That's when I fell in love with Regency England. I imagine that I — and everyone around me — thought it was just another one of my historical phases... but I never seemed to grow out of this one. I spent much of my teenage years, nose buried in historical romances, bemoaning the fact that I was born more than a century too late to enter the swirling beau monde that waltzed its way through the glittering ball rooms of London for my own season.

All was not lost, however. Through a stroke of very good luck I found myself at Smith College, where I was free to explore my wild obsessions. I had a group of friends who shared my love of historical fiction; we traded romances, talked Austen, and imagined what it would be like to be courted... really courted. I majored in history and somewhere along the way learned a rhyme that lists the Kings and Queens of England in order. After graduation, I went on a trip across Britain with my mother. We stopped in Hampshire, where I sat in the gardens of the Austen home and breathed the air of Aunt Jane.

Next, I found my way to New York, where I took a job in publishing and all those years of reading paid off. I bounced through several jobs and a graduate degree, amassing an unfathomably large collection of Regency fiction along the way, which fill s the bookshelves of my Brooklyn home to bursting. I am lucky to have a husband and dog who overlook my eccentricities and, sometimes, love me better for them.

And now, I'm happy to say that, through writing, I have the chance to put my crazy, eclectic life to good use and, while I may never be able to live up to the British spy and the jet-setting Italian, my characters are certainly making a go of it.