Linda Beutler's professional life is spent in a garden, an organic garden housing America's foremost public collection of clematis vines and a host of fabulous companion plants. Her home life reveals a more personal garden, still full of clematis, but also antique roses and vintage perennials planted around and over a 1907 cottage. But one can never have enough of gardening, so in 2011 she began cultivating a weedy patch of Jane Austen fan fiction ideas. The first of these to ripen was The Red Chrysanthemum (Meryton Press, 2013), which won a silver IPPY for romance writing in 2014. You might put this down as beginner's luck-Linda certainly does. The next harvest brought Longbourn to London (Meryton Press, 2014), known widely as "the [too] sexy one." In 2015, Meryton Press published the bestseller A Will of Iron, a macabre rom-com based on the surprising journals of Anne de Bourgh. Now, after a yearlong break in JAFF writing to produce Plant Lovers Guide to Clematis (Timber Press, 2016)-the third in a bouquet of books on gardening-we have My Mr. Darcy and Your Mr. Bingley bursting into bloom.
