A voracious reader who’s been fascinated by the Regency ever since she first picked up Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Penrose received her undergraduate degree in art (though she also took enough history courses for a major in that as well) from Yale and earned her MFA in Graphic Design from the Yale School of Art, concentrating in publication design. Reading her books, I’m always introduced to a new aspect of the intellectual life of the period and also reminded that our own is far from the only historical period in which conflicts around the interpretation, communication and commercialization of new discoveries reached fever pitch. While such innovations rarely resulted in real-life murders, Penrose’s novels offer a vivid and realistic sense of the tensions that arose around them. With a satirical artist and an amateur chemist as protagonists, the series makes rich use of the era’s complex scientific and cultural innovations. I’m delighted to share my interview with author Andrea Penrose on her fifth Wrexford and Sloane Regency-era mystery, Murder at the Royal Botanic Gardens.
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