Kate Moore grew up in Peterborough, England, and began her career in publishing as the editorial director at Penguin Random House UK. In 2017, she began working as an author, ghostwriter, and freelance editor. She has written 11 books; her nonfiction breakout title, The Radium Girls, a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller, follows the effects of radium poisoning acquired by young women working as watch dial painters in North America during the first decades of the 20th century.

Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard was born in Ware, Massachusetts, in 1816, the daughter of a Calvinist minister. As a young woman whose family had means, she attended the Amherst Female Seminary and went on to become the principal of Randolph College, a school for women. While there, at 19, Elizabeth was sent to Worcester State Lunatic Asylum, where she remained for six weeks until she was pronounced recovered. She received exceptional care, but a retrospective investigation of her experience confirmed that she had a physical, not mental, illness, likely a brain infection closely associated with encephalitis or meningitis. When she was 23, she married Reverend Theophilus Packard, 15 years her senior. Together they had children, and in 1854, they left New England and moved to the Midwest, finally settling in Manteno, Illinois.