A Biography of Patricia Gaffney
Patricia Gaffney is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of twelve historical romances and five contemporary women’s fiction titles. She has won the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart award and has been nominated six times for the RWA’s RITA award for excellence in romance writing.
Born on December 17, 1944, in Tampa, Florida, to an Irish Catholic family, Gaffney grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. After graduating from college, she worked as a high school teacher for one year before beginning a fifteen-year career as a freelance court reporter. It was during this time that she met her husband, Jon Pearson.
Gaffney’s life changed course in 1984 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her battle with the disease prompted her, in 1986, to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. Her first novel, Sweet Treason (1989), won a 1988 Golden Heart Award and the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice award for First Historical Romance. Her second novel, Fortune’s Lady (1989), which is set in England against the backdrop of the French Revolution, was shortlisted for the RITA. She followed her early success with Another Eden (1992), Crooked Hearts (1994), Sweet Everlasting (1994), Lily (1996), Outlaw in Paradise (1997), and Wild at Heart (1997), the latter of which was among ten finalists for RWA’s reader-nominated Favorite Book of the Year Award.
Since the late nineties, Gaffney has found added success writing women’s fiction. Her novels The Saving Graces (1999), Circle of Three (2000), Flight Lessons (2002), and The Goodbye Summer (2004) all appeared on several national bestseller lists. The Saving Graces was on the New York Times bestseller list for seventeen weeks.
With her friends Nora Roberts (writing as J. D. Robb), Mary Blayney, and others, Gaffney has also contributed novellas to three anthologies, all of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Gaffney lives with her husband and two dogs in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.
Gaffney at age three.
Gaffney celebrating her twenty-first birthday in Vienna, Austria, during her junior year studying abroad.
Gaffney attended graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s pictured here during what she refers to as her “hippie days” in the early 1970s.
Gaffney and her husband Jon Pearson, high on love.
Class photo from East Mecklenberg High School in Charlotte, NC, where Gaffney taught twelfth-grade English for a year.
Romance Writers of America Winner’s Ribbon from the 1988 conference in Seattle.
At Nora Roberts’s house in the early 1990s. Left to right: Nora Roberts, Mary Blayney, Christine Dorsey, Elaine Fox, Gaffney, Beth Harbison, and Mary Kay McComas.
Example of a first draft, always done longhand.
A final outline for Mad Dash.
The Gaffney clan in 1989. From left: Mike (brother), mother, father, Pat.
Gaffney and Jon with their dog Hannah in 2000.
Gaffney with Jon and dogs Jolene (left) and Finney (right) in 2007.
Gaffney’s office in the attic.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1989 by Patricia Gaffney
cover design by Connie Gabbert
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Patricia Gaffney, Fortune's Lady
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