Her style of writing has been compared to that of Vivien Armstrong, Linda Fairstein and Frances Fyfield.
Raised in Wolverhampton, Ashford became the first woman to graduate from Queens' College, Cambridge in its 550-year history.
Ashford was then employed as a reporter for the BBC before becoming a freelance journalist, writing for a number of national magazines and newspapers.
Her novel, With Love and Crocodiles, was published independently on 4 November 2013, and was then revised and re-published in April 2015, under the title, "The Color of Secrets."
Her novel "The Woman on the Orient Express," published in 2016, is a novel with a fictional version of Agatha Christie as its heroine.