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From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.

I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It's what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

After high school, I went to Stanford University and majored in English. Of course, that gave me a chance to do lots more reading and writing. I also received degrees in London and Dublin - where I moved to be near a charming Irishman who became my husband!

I loved English, and I did very well in it. A lot of teachers encouraged me to write, and because of that, it later made me think it was possible to be a writer.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of 'The Spectator.'