Born in New York City to a painter and a well-known fashion artist, Stephanie began scribbling stories as soon as she could write and later, on adolescent sleepover weekends with her friends, shared them. By age twenty she had twice won the national Seventeen award for short stories.
But she diverted into music and as a high soprano, sang over thirty roles in small opera companies and traditional songs with guitar. She formed a classical singing ensemble called The Lyric Quartet which sang everywhere from prisons to concert halls, produced a Renaissance Faire in Central Park, and a music/dance series in Bryant Park in the center of the city. She also formed a chamber opera company called Strawberry where she sang the part of a young Roman soldier in a Mozart opera. Both the experience of translating the libretto into English and the words of the leading tenor who told her, “You’re a very good singer but you are really a writer,” sent her back to creating stories.
Stephanie’s new Regal novel Blanche and the Water Lilies (Autumn 2027) is about the fascinating relationship of the artist Claude Monet and his stepdaughter Blanche. He first taught her to paint when she was very young, and when he was old with failing vision and poor health, she came home to Giverny to support him in painting his great waterlily/garden panels which hang in Paris in the L’Orangerie today, a hundred years ago 1927. Called by some scholars “the forgotten Monet,” Blanche’s work has been emerging in solo exhibitions recently around the world.
Stephanie’s first three published novels were drawn from her love of Shakespeare and his period: The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, The Physician of London and Nicholas Cooke: actor, soldier, physician, priest) – all published by W.W. Norton. Her fourth novel Marrying Mozart (Viking Penguin) was conceived in New York’s Café Mozart while drinking Viennese coffee and scribbling down ideas for the book on a napkin. Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet (Crown/Random House) which is about Monet when he was unknown and poor, drew on her childhood visits to museums and her parents’ constant talk of the great French artists. Her sixth novel The Boy in the Rain, an Edwardian love story between two young men, haunted her for decades before it was finished. And The Man in the Stone Cottage: a novel of the Brontë sisters likely had its genesis when she first read Wuthering Heights at age fourteen. Her books have been translated into German, French, Italian and several other languages. She won an American Book Award for The Physician of London.
Stephanie has lived in the same apartment in an old building in an historic area of New York City for fifty-three years. She has two very grown sons and at least fifteen hundred books.
Regal House Publishing is proud to be publishing Blanche and the Water Lilies in the fall of 2027.
