Eleanor Fairfax read History at university with a stubborn specialism in the Tudor court, and has spent the twenty years since as a heritage-education officer at a great English house — a genuine Tudor manor with a long gallery, a priest’s hole, and a household inventory from 1540 that she can, and will, recite. She writes the period from inside its rooms because she has spent her working life in them.

Raised in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the daughter of a cathedral archivist, Eleanor grew up among old documents and older buildings and became fascinated early by the people in the margins of the great chronicles — the women listed once as ‘and her ladies,’ who were present at every turning point of the Tudor century and named in almost none of them. Her fiction is her act of restitution: meticulously researched, worn lightly, and told from the vantage of the maids of honour, gentlewomen, and servants who watched history happen and had to survive it.

Her Queen’s Women series follows that below-stairs lineage across the reigns, one woman and one lethal court crisis per book, beginning with a new maid of honour in the year of Anne Boleyn’s fall. Readers can expect immersive Tudor detail, credible heroines who survive by wit rather than anachronism, political danger and quiet romance braided through real events, and the particular satisfaction of watching a powerless woman outlast the people who hold all the power.

Eleanor lives in Shropshire with her husband, David, a cabinetmaker who builds her the odd Tudor-joinery prop, a spaniel named Wolsey who is far too pleased with himself, and a study wall of household inventories and family trees. She still gives tours of the long gallery on Saturdays, and still starts every one by pointing out the woman in the background of the portrait that everyone ignores.