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All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.

I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.

I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era.

As an undergraduate at Amherst College, I was devoted to Dickensian novels and antiestablishment journalism while marginally fulfilling premedical requirements.

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.

My master's degree was in English literature.

'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.