The Davies family lived in Morriston, a large town located within the city of Swansea.
The only child of an RAF officer, Davies left Wales at the age of two and spent a nomadic childhood in Egypt, Germany and Scotland in the 1950s.
[4] Davies has published widely in the fields of fiction, literary criticism, biography and popular history.
Her non-fiction work includes titles on the Brontë family, John Milton and Henry Vaughan.
Davies' first novel, Boy Blue, was published by The Women's Press in 1987, and won the Fawcett Society Book Prize later that year.