1–What is the title of your latest release? A DRESS OF VIOLET TAFFETA: the story of the real-life Lucy Duff Gordon, between the years of 1893 to 1913, who designed exquisite dresses under her label Lucile Ltd.   2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? Lucy Wallace has been abandoned by her spendthrift alcoholic husband—again. Now a single mother with a five-year-old daughter to support the only marketable talent Lucy has is her ability to make doll’s clothes which are the envy of her little girl’s playmates. With very little money, and completely untaught, Lucy starts a dressmaking business that will grow to become a fashion empire in London, New York, and Paris. Her success is remarkable for a single woman in the early 1900s in an industry dominated by male designers. Then one bitterly cold night in 1912 a catastrophe occurs that will once again change the course of Lucy’s life—and once again failure is not an option!   3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? I wanted to write about the part of Lucy Duff Gordon’s life from 1893 to 1913 when she not only built a fashion empire from scratch but…

Half a dozen women, standing by a makeshift bar in Didcote’s Air Transit Auxiliary’s mess turned appraising faces toward us. For one panicky moment I felt I was back at boarding school on the first day of term. “Good morning, Miss Redfern, I’m Vera Abercrombie, Didcote’s commanding officer.” A compact looking woman with a direct no nonsense gaze introduced herself. I suppose, like everyone else who first met her, I was surprised that the Didcote ATA commanding officer wasn’t the standard issue senior male RAF officer with a waxed moustache. Vera Abercrombie was probably in her mid-thirties, but her fair northern skin was deeply lined, either from years of flying, or put there by the burdensome responsibility of her war-time job. She carried a clip-board with a sheaf of papers pinned to it and her glance strayed to it often, as if she might have inadvertently overlooked some small but important detail. There are not many women who have shot to the heights of command that Vera Abercrombie had achieved, without being conscious of their seniority every hour of their long working day, but there was no arrogance in her greeting and no feeling that this was her ‘show,’ and…