Fredrica grew up in country Australia speaking cant terms straight from the Regency period, which are now disappearing from use due to the invention of television. Her husband teases her on how easily she can still drop into the lingo if she meets an old timer, but as he once used the word "gammon" in polite conversation - a term only used by highwaymen in Georgette Heyer novels; she pays him no heed. Fredrica spent her summer holidays with her great aunt, a modern miss who learnt to drive a car, and conveyed her husband to the pub once a week when he became too old to get on a horse. Fred first read Pride and Prejudice at fifteen and thought it very entertaining. She next read it at thirty and thought it a work of genius.
Alice McVeigh has been twice-published by Orion/Hachette in contemporary fiction, by UK's Unbound (using a pen name) in Kirkus-starred action adventure and by Warleigh Hall Press in her multi-award-winning Austenesque series (honoured at the last two London Book Fairs, in the UK Selfies awards).
Alice achieved a B.Mus with distinction in performance at Jacobs Indiana University School of Music, and spent three years studying cello privately with William Pleeth, Jacqueline du Pre’s “cello daddy”. After that she freelanced with orchestras including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic and Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique all over the UK, the EU, America and Asia.
Leenie Brown has always been a girl with an active imagination, which, while growing up, was both an asset, providing many hours of fun as she played out stories, and a liability, when her older sister and aunt would tell her frightening tales. At one time, they had her convinced Dracula lived in the trunk at the end of the bed she slept in when visiting her grandparents!
Although it has been years since she cowered in her bed in her grandparents’ basement, she still has an imagination which occasionally runs away with her, and she feeds it now as she did then ─ by reading!
Her heroes, when growing up, were authors, and the worlds they painted with words were (and still are) her favourite playgrounds! Now, as an adult, she spends much of h
