She was an accountant and company director until she began writing in 1980 following a serious riding accident which left her temporarily disabled.
She has written biographies of Beryl Markham, Amelia Earhart, Jane Digby, Richard Francis Burton, Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, the Mitford Girls, Bess of Hardwick and the Churchills.
Her book on Markham, Straight on Till Morning, researched and written in under a year, after weeks of interviews with the subject in Nairobi, became an immediate international bestseller when it was published in 1987 and was twelve weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.
She also wrote The Mitford Girls (titled The Sisters in the USA), a biography of the celebrated Mitford sisters, first published in September 2001 (paperback August 2002), and her Bess of Hardwick, was published in the UK in 2005.
Until 2011 she often led reader groups interested in Jane Digby around Syria to follow in the footsteps of this favourite subject of hers.