About me
I’ve written professionally all my adult life. On leaving university I worked in the City of London writing for financial magazines which was challenging as my degree had been in English, not Economics. Later when my children were little I wrote on various subjects for local newspapers and subsequently embarked on a freelance career as a journalist for publications such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times and Gardens Illustrated, writing mainly about property and property related issues, including over sixty feature articles for The Daily Telegraph and The Times. One such article won a prestigious national award and another, on gardens, attracted the attention of The Prince of Wales. In 2000 I set up my own online property search company, Surrey Houses, writing property reviews and local market information for my company website for over fifteen years. During this time I had the great pleasure of helping people - families, couples and singles - find homes, big and small, throughout Surrey, homes that closely fulfilled clients’ individual criteria and specific requirements (unlike Location, Location, Location).
My debut novel
Of course I always had aspirations to write a novel and one day I came across a real-life story that was so out-of-the-ordinary and intriguing that I knew I had found my subject matter.
What was it that so totally captured my imagination? Close to my home in Surrey is an historic landscape garden, Painshill Park, which has been undergoing major restoration for many years. Pains Hill (original spelling) had been an internationally famous garden in the eighteenth century but it fell into neglect and then ruin during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries after its creator, Charles Hamilton, had been forced to sell it to meet his debts and avoid bankruptcy. For Hamilton the creation of Pains Hill was a tale of overarching ambition and obsession which perhaps was always destined to be a financial failure. Indeed, there were further extraordinary elements to the story: Hamilton was a frustrated artist who was inspired by Italian landscape painting to create a garden as a three-dimensional work of art but he had neither the land nor the money to achieve his great ambition and so he borrowed the necessary funds from his close friend, Henry Fox, who in turn, as the Government’s Paymaster General, had pilfered from the Treasury finances.
View of Painshill Park from the restored gothic folly
Not only did Charles Hamilton sculpt and shape his land in a revolutionary garden style, creating a huge lake and islands, and adorning the garden with romantic follies, but he was among the first in England to grow newly discovered trees and plants, mostly from North America, and he even established a successful vineyard. For me as a writer, this was the kind of large-scale, very visual story, an epic tale in which man aspires to play god.
Then I asked myself a very twenty-first century question, “What did his wife think of his obsession?” Of course, this would not have been an issue in the eighteenth century, but I still wondered? Researching further, I read that his first wife had died very young and that not only were the circumstances of her death unknown, even her identity remains a mystery. So there was the heartbeat of my novel.
Since this took place in the early eighteenth century, the novel required an enormous amount of historical research - I wanted readers to be transported back to this dynamic but perilous era and to become immersed in it. I also added a more modern-day element to the novel, a second narrative set in the 1990s in which a young female historian is researching Hamilton’s life. This gave me the opportunity to explore the distortion and falsehoods of historical interpretation. Oh, and this modern female protagonist, like Hamilton’s wife, is in danger, as she is being stalked by an old foe.
Today the successfully restored Painshill Park attracts thousands of visitors every year and it has also become a popular film location, featuring in diverse productions including Suffragette, 101 Dalmatians, Dorian Gray and Black Mirror. Most recently, Painshill has been seen in the lavish Neflix period drama, Bridgerton.
Click on the Pains Hill page for some snippets from the novel, plus pictures, and click on next for my next novel which is set in Venice, not in the distant past but in the twenty-first century. If you would like to be kept informed of the publication date please contact me by email below.