Rebecca Jenkins

Rebecca Jenkins was born into history and never recovered. Her first home was a 15th Century college house in Oxford High Street with the red and white roses of the War of the Roses carved over the door.

In her early teens she was such a fan of D’Orczy’s Scarlett Pimpernel, she took up fencing determined to master the “prise de fer”. Her library began at the same age – collecting cheap between-the-wars editions of diaries and memoirs from the Georgian era. She spent the second half of her childhood in Switzerland but returned to Oxford University to take a degree in history.

Sewing a loose buckle on a towering ugly sister’s shoe aged 16, as a dresser at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, Rebecca discovered a fascination with theatre and celebrity that later led to her first non-fiction book, a biography of Georgian actress and anti-slavery campaigner, Fanny Kemble (The Reluctant Celebrity, Simon & Schuster 2005).

Raif Jarrett, the returning soldier and detective of her Regency mystery series first appeared in The Duke’s Agent in 1997. Despite many the distractions of a busy career in communications and PR, his world remains her first love. In between producing a book on The First London Olympics, 1908 (Piatkus Little Brown 2012), the opening novels of the Faith Morgan series (as Martha Ockley – Monarch Books), and serving as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at York St John University, she managed to return to write the second book of the series, Death of a Radical. She is presently at work on the third Jarrett mystery.

Get in touch with Rebecca

You can check out Rebecca’s website and follow her on Twitter here.