In the last 11 years, New York Times bestselling author Sabrina Jeffries has penned 18 Regency romances and four novellas — becoming a regular on both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists and winning more than a dozen industry awards in the process.  

    

New Orleans-born, Thailand-reared, Jeffries attributes her success to listening to what peers, her publisher and her own common sense told her she should be writing: “I write what I enjoy reading: lighter, sexier historical romances, with more dialogue and more sensuality.”  

 

Writing about 19th-century English life comes naturally for Jeffries.  Not only is she a lifelong Jane Austen fan, but she has a doctorate in English lit from Tulane and a specialty in Early Modern British literature.  Yet the impetus for her stories, Jeffries says, is always “what if” — not what if her hero likes this or that, but what if this happened and this happened ... what would it do to a person?
 

And she writes, she says, because “I can't not write . . . I have stories in my head, and I have to get them out.”

 

Today, the novelist has more than 4.5 million Sabrina Jeffries books in print.  She writes at her home in Cary, N.C., where she lives with husband, Rene, and their son, Nick.  When not answering e-mails as she logs miles on her treadmill or doing jigsaw puzzles (“my reward for finishing a book”), Jeffries can be found championing the cause of autistic children in the name of her son.