Jane Steen Books in Order

If you want her American historical mystery saga: The House of Closed Doors → Eternal Deception → The Shadow Palace → The Jewel Cage
If you prefer Victorian England and an aristocratic sleuth: Lady Helena Investigates → Lady Odelia's Secret → Lady Ambition's Dilemma
If you want a quick taste of her ghostly side: The Unforgotten → The Bars of the Marshalsea

Jane Steen was born in Surrey, England, in 1959 and grew up mostly in Surrey and Kent, with a four-year stretch in the Midlands. She has said she was named after Jane Eyre, which feels like an early hint of the kind of books she would end up writing, stories steeped in the nineteenth century, full of secrets, pressure, and people trying to make a life inside tight social rules.

The Victorian world got hold of her early.

Instead of following the usual university route right away, Steen trained at the Secretarial College of the French Institute in London and qualified as a bilingual secretary in 1980. She went to Brussels to look for work and stayed in Belgium for sixteen years, moving through a long list of jobs that made good use of her languages and writing skills. She worked as a committee reporter, an editor in a law firm, a translator for an aerospace magazine, and an associate in a legal and tax business. During those years she also studied English law through the University of London and took courses in Belgian and European Community law.

Brussels shaped her personal life too. She met her husband, Bob Steen, through expatriate theatre groups, with him on sound and her working as a prompter. Later the family moved to the Chicago area with their two daughters, and Steen added another layer to her education with a master's degree in liberal studies, writing a thesis on Henry James, Émile Zola, and late nineteenth-century artistic genius.

She did not arrive at fiction by taking the neat route.

In Chicago she worked in real estate marketing, retail, fundraising, and freelance writing. Around 2009 she began her first novel, which remained unpublished, but the experience made the direction of travel clear. After attending her first writers' conference, she decided to self-publish the next book, set up Aspidistra Press, and released The House of Closed Doors in 2012. It was a practical choice as much as a creative one: she wanted to keep control of her work and build a career on her own terms.

That first published novel introduced readers to Nell Lillington, a young woman in 1870s Illinois whose fight for independence is tangled up with scandal, murder, and the fear of social ruin. Steen carried Nell's story forward in Eternal Deception, The Shadow Palace, and The Jewel Cage, moving from small-town Illinois to frontier Kansas and then to Chicago. Readers who like these books tend to respond to their mix of mystery, family drama, romance, and the everyday realities faced by women who had very little room to make mistakes.

She writes mysteries, but she also writes lives.

Her Scott-De Quincy books shift the scene to Sussex in the 1880s. Lady Helena Investigates, Lady Odelia's Secret, and Lady Ambition's Dilemma follow a widowed aristocrat who keeps finding crime and buried family trouble on her doorstep, often with help from her maid Guttridge and the mysterious French doctor Armand Fortier. Across both series, Steen returns to questions of class, inheritance, loyalty, reputation, and the uneasy space between what society expects and what a woman actually wants.

She also likes the ghostlier corners of the period, as shown in shorter works such as The Unforgotten and The Bars of the Marshalsea. Steen now lives in Rye on England's south coast after many years abroad. She has written about gardening and handcrafts as lasting interests, and she earned a black belt in Shotokan karate at forty-eight, a detail that nicely matches the persistence readers tend to spot in her books.