Anna Dean

I live in the English Lake District with a husband and a cat. I write compulsively. It all started with a mistake. When I was taught to write at the age of five I assumed that I must write books. By the time I realised my mistake and understood that it was not actually compulsory to create stories, the habit was too deeply ingrained to give up.

My latest novel, The Yellow Pimpernel, is a light-hearted adventure taking as its starting point the idea that a woman in the early 19th Century might decide to save women from the oppression of a male dominated society. She models herself a little on The Scarlet Pimpernel and his exploits in revolutionary France. So this is a slightly unreal world - one in which Baroness Orczy's fictional hero really existed. But I aim to keep the style grounded in the period. The problems that women face in the story were certainly real enough in 1822. And perhaps some of them still are...

The Dido Kent series of mystery novels has grown out of many things including my enjoyment of puzzles and word-play, my love of the English countryside, my interest in old houses, my time spent reading eighteenth and nineteenth century documents and my affection for the work of Jane Austen. The books are set in the same period as Jane Austen's work, and they tend to focus on '3 or 4 families in a country village' - the setting which she once described as 'the delight of my life.'

I have also published a non-fiction book, Jane and Dorothy, under the name Marian Veevers. This compares the lives of two near contemporary women, Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth, as a way of exploring the restrictions and opportunities experienced by middle-class women who did not marry in Georgian England. In particular it looks at the impact of the different choices these two particular 'spinsters' made in their lives.

Apart from writing, my other interests include: walking, visiting old houses, watching Star Trek and canoeing on very flat water.