Angela Lambert is a journalist, an historian, and a novelist--roughly in that order, though she remains all three. Beginning in 1989, she has published seven novels, which constitute a study of the way lives are shaped by history, by accident, by class, and by love.

Angela Maria Helps was born 14 April 1940, the child of John Donald Helps and Edith Paula Alice Helps. Her father was a civil servant and her mother a homemaker. She declared in 2001, in unpublished correspondence, that she regarded her date of birth as "a piece of extraordinary good luck, since it meant that I was one of the first wave of women to benefit from the Pill, feminism and equal (if still far from perfect) opportunities." As a girl she attended a boarding school, and, she told Maureen Paton in an interview for The Guardian (30 December 1998), "the memory of being dumped by her unfeeling parents...