Nicola Cornick

Nicola lived in Yorkshire until she was eighteen, very close to the areas that inspired the Brontë sisters to write Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. One of her grandfathers was a poet, and the family had teachers and voracious readers who filled the house with books. With these backgrounds, it was impossible for Nicola not to become an avid reader. Nicola went to the typical school where girls were taught how to find a rich husband and how to gracefully get in and out of a Rolls-Royce. Unfortunately, Nicola didn't pay much attention to that sort of thing, just like finding a rich husband, and therefore never had the opportunity to ride in a Rolls-Royce. Reading kept her very busy. At school, she also developed her love for history, English and French literature. Meanwhile, Nicola spent her afternoons reading romance novels, historical fiction, and watching old films with her grandmother. Her grandparents were very influential and also taught her to sew, dance ballroom dancing, and plant rhubarb. These influences were decisive, and Nicola Cornick uses them in her historical novels. At eighteen, she went south to study history at the University of London, and during the holidays she did a variety of jobs, from putting price tags on a shoe factory to serving soft drinks at a train station. When she finished university, she had to do uninteresting jobs to earn a living and worked as an administrator. She moved to Somerset and lived for seven years in a cottage frequented by the ghost of a knight. Nicola met her husband while at university, although it took her four years to realize that he was special and not just a friend. Her husband, who was much more perceptive, realized it much sooner, and finally, they came to an understanding. This lack of perception also meant that Nicola didn't realize for years that she wanted to be a writer. She wrote several novels in her spare time but never finished them. Finally, she sent the first three chapters of a novel to Mills & Boon, and although they were rejected, she had found the writing bug and couldn't ignore it. Luckily, everything went well on the third try, and he never looked back again.