Emma was born and brought up in London, the middle of three sisters. Her mother is an English teacher, and her father was a lawyer in the Foreign Office, so they also spent three years in Manhattan and another three commuting between London and Brussels. Perhaps inevitably, in Emma' s memory, supper table arguments were usually about words: their exact meaning, ambiguities, overtones, etymology and changing use. Driving across the USA in a camper van, their father retold the stories of the Greek myths, and their mother read them Edward Lear, The Princess and the Goblin and Noel Streatfeild. Later, in airports and on cross-channel ferries, it was Shakespeare, Kidnapped and Jane Austen.

The family spent many holidays on the Essex/Suffolk border, where much of The Mathematics of Love is set, and from Brussels they travelled around Europe. Other memories have shaped the novel too: the battlefield of Waterloo, and the road from San Sebastian to Bilbao. They were even once caught by the Guardia Civil when they set up camp by mistake on General Franco's country estate. A Secret Alchemy has many of its roots in Emma’s London childhood: films like Olivier’s Richard III, visits to the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, memories of Josephine Tey's detective story The Daughter of Time, and always the layers of history that underlie everything, and show wherever the modern surface cracks.

Emma liked writing stories as a child, but history was her passion. She read Geoffrey Trease, Cynthia Harnett, Barbara Willard, and time-slip novels like Penelope Farmer's frightening Charlotte Sometimes. She moved on to Hornblower, Heyer and Mary Renault, but as a teenager caught the theatre bug and went up to the University of Birmingham to read Drama. To this day Emma says that she uses what she learnt of characterisation, subtext and stagecraft in her own writing, but she also worked through her stage-struckness and out the other side. Her Finals dissertation was on play publishing; realising that the book industry was a place where she felt at home, she spent some years in academic publishing, and it was only when she had two small children that she started writing again. Then she was diverted: her first camera had been a tenth birthday present, and now she finally acquired a darkroom.

But Emma became more and more sure that writing is what matters to her, and she got a place on the MPhil in Writing at the University of Glamorgan, where her tutor was novelist and poet Christopher Meredith. By that time she had discovered Peter Ackroyd, Allan Massie, Rose Tremain and A. S. Byatt. Historical fiction for adults had become what it has always been for children: a unique space where serious writers can explore fundamental desires and fears, while revelling in the nearness and otherness of worlds that we know were here, but can' t quite see. The novel she wrote for the degree became The Mathematics of Love.

Emma graduated from the MPhil just as The Mathematics of Love was being sold to Headline Review. She found the form of a research degree so fruitful that she applied to do a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, where her supervisor is Maura Dooley. Meanwhile rights to The Mathematics of Love were being sold in – to date - the United States, France, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Poland, Serbia and Greece.  A Secret Alchemy is one result of that PhD, while it has also developed Emma’s interest in historical fiction as a genre, and Creative Writing as a subject.

Emma now lives with her children in South East London, still surrounded by history: there was a Viking fort on the hill behind their house, and down the road is Eltham Palace, where many important scenes in A Secret Alchemy are set. No further away is William Morris’s Red House, which inspired the Chantry and the Pryor family in the novel, and Down House, home of Charles Darwin and his cousin and wife Emma Wedgwood: Emma’s great-great-grandparents.