Tasha Alexander
The daughter of two philosophy professors, I grew up surrounded by books. I was convinced from an early age that I was born in the wrong century and spent much of my childhood under the dining room table pretending it was a covered wagon. Even there, I was never without a book in hand and loved reading and history more than anything. I studied English Literature and Medieval History at the University of Notre Dame. Writing is a natural offshoot of reading, and my first novel, And Only to Deceive, was published in 2005. I'm the author of the long-running Lady Emily Series as well as the novel Elizabeth: The Golden Age. One of the best parts of being an author is seeing your books translated, and I'm currently in love with the Japanese editions of the Emily books.
I played nomad for a long time, living in Indiana, Amsterdam, London, Wyoming, Vermont, Connecticut, and Tennessee before settling down. My husband, the brilliant British novelist Andrew Grant (I may be biased but that doesn't mean I'm wrong) and I live in southeastern Wyoming. I still don't have a covered wagon, but a log house goes a long way toward fulfilling my pioneer fantasies. Andrew makes sure I get my English characters right, and I make sure his American ones sound American.
“Beastly of him to die before you realized he might be fascinating.”
“I shall be forever grateful to you for breaking whatever unfortunate object you did in order to rescue me.”“Something had to be done, she said, “and it was a very ugly vase.”
“You've faced horrors in these past weeks... I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.”
“You do know, I hope, that no man under the age of forty can even approach fascinating.”
“It's delicious to have people adore you, but it's exhausting, too. Particularly when your own feelings don't match theirs.”
“That's the trouble with grand passions, of course. You can never entirely cleanse yourself of them. It's best to avoid them altogether.”
“At least as a single woman, I had time to pursue my own interests, read voraciously, and travel when opportunity presented.”
“As we experience things, they happen too quickly to be thoughly analyzed...”
“An appreciation for high fashion does not preclude possession of common sense.”
“Oh, I don't read. I skulk about in search of quotations that might make me appear educated.”