Fun read: The Little Women Letters

Listen to interview.

Gabrielle Donnelly was born in London and has known that she wanted to be a writer for as long as she can remember. She read, wrote, and daydreamed her way through grammar school in North London and to a degree from London University. When she was 22, she got her first job as a reporter in the London office of The Weekly News and she’s made her living as a journalist ever since.

In 1980, she decided that she should probably at least briefly experience living somewhere other than London before it was too late, so she moved to LA for a six-month working vacation. She has never returned.

A committed singleton throughout her twenties and thirties, she surprised herself and everyone else at over forty by falling madly in love with and marrying Los Angeles-born computer specialist Owen Bjornstad. They live in Los Angeles in a spectacularly untidy house a couple of miles from the ocean, and make each other laugh a very great deal. Gabrielle is a Corporator of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House Museum in Concord, Massachusetts.

The Little Women Letters is Gabrielle’s fifth novel and she says it is the one she has had by far the most fun writing.