Romance History: Jennifer Blake

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Patricia Anne Ponder was born March 9, 1942, in a 120-year-old raised cottage built of hand-pegged cypress with a "mud-daub chimney and a roof of hewn shingles," she recalls. "The home of my maternal grandparents in Goldonna, Louisiana. My grandmother, a locally famous midwife, delivered me by the light of a coal oil lantern, following a pattern that had begun when my ancestors settled in that remote back country swampland of Louisiana in the early 1830s, and did not change until well into the decade after World War II."

She believes she had an ideal childhood. "I was healthy, happy, confident, part of an extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. My parents made me feel special; attractive, intelligent, loved. During the fifties careers for girls were not actively discouraged," Patricia admits, "but the atmosphere for them was not favorable. Most girls were quietly groomed to become wives and mothers, and there seemed no reason to delay. The fall I was fourteen, I began receiving anonymous poems. How could I, given my temperament, resist such an approach? I met my poet. Jerry Maxwell, a few weeks later, and the summer I was fifteen, we were married. By the time I was twenty, I had three pre-school age children". Patricia quit high school when she married but did complete the requirements for a GED diploma. "At that time, I devoured seven or eight books every week; Gothics, Westerns, historicals, classics, romances of every category. They were like a narcotic, something I craved, something so necessary to me I literally could not do without them," she remembers. Then the day came when she began to be vaguely dissatisfied. As she read she could see ways that, to her, the stories could have been made better, more interesting, more satisfying. One day she threw a book down with those famous last words: "I could do better than that!"

Maxwell has now been churning out novels as Jennifer Blake for over 30 years. She writes both contemporary romance novels as well as historicals, many of them set between 1830-1850. The vast majority of her novels are set in Louisiana. Maxwell and her husband live in Northern Louisiana, with a second home in Colorado. They have four children and several grandchildren.

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