Jane Anstey began writing before she left junior school, and had her first story published, aged eleven, in the school magazine. She graduated from Oxford University in 1976 with a degree in Modern History and taught for four years before her first child was born in 1982. Combining work with motherhood proved easier as a freelance and she took up copy-editing and educational writing in 1986. She now lives in Cornwall, England, in a house overlooking the moors.