Ann Shaffer

Mary Ann Shaffer was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia. She attended Miami University in Ohio and married in 1958. After moving to California with her husband, Shaffer had two daughters. Over the course of her lifetime, Shaffer worked as a bookshop clerk, a librarian, and at the publishing house Harper and Row first as a receptionist and later, as an editor. The idea for Guernsey took hold in 1980, when Shaffer traveled to Cambridge to conduct research for a biography of Kathleen Scott. When Shaffer discovered that Scott's personal papers were unusable, she decided to spend part of her trip in Guernsey but ended up stranded in the Guernsey airport when it shut down due to fog. She spent her time in the airport's bookstore reading about the German occupation of the island, but she didn't begin actually writing the novel until twenty years later. Soon after the novel was accepted for publication, Shaffer's editor requested extensive rewriting. Shaffer was by then fighting cancer and so asked her niece, children's book author Annie Barrows, to finish the novel. Guernsey was published posthumously in the same year that Shaffer died.