There are two types of books in Sabrina Jeffries’ home office. On one shelf are the “serious” books — T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. On the other shelf is a different kind of book, novels with pink and purple covers, with raised gold letters and air-brushed cover models bent in passionate poses, all rippling pectorals and heaving bosoms.

It might come as a surprise to those who stereotype romance novel aficionados as uneducated housewives to know that popular romance novelist Jeffries has a doctorate in English literature.

She even wrote her dissertation on notoriously complicated modernist writer James Joyce.

“After I got my Ph.D. I think I really got very burned out,” said Jeffries, 48, sitting in the bedroom-turned-office of her Cary home. She came home one day and told her husband “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

A few months later, her first novel “poured out,” before she even knew she was writing a novel.

Twenty-five novels later, Jeffries, a large, expressive woman with feathery brown hair, carves out a comfortable existence writing historical romances set in the 19th century.

Her latest book, “Beware a Scot’s Revenge,” just made the New York Times bestseller list.

These days, her favorite authors are more likely to write under pen names.

In fact, Sabrina Jeffries is a pen name too — on the dotted line she’s known as Deborah Gonzales.

Growing up in rural Thailand, the daughter of Baptist missionaries, Jeffries read everything she could get her hands on to beat back the boredom of jungle life.

“I even read ‘War and Peace’ because I heard it was the longest novel in the English language,” she said.

She gravitated towards “serious” fiction because she thought it would prove her intelligence, she said, though throughout college and graduate school she devoured romances as a way to relax.

Later, living in New Orleans, married and raising an autistic son, she found the boundaries of romance novels to be a comfort in difficult times.

“I have to have a happily-ever-after ending,” she said.

After she and her family moved to Cary, she began to write in Mr. Toad’s coffee shop, often spending up to nine hours a day there.

But, as outgoing and the bubbly Jeffries is, she eventually found herself getting distracted.

“I got to know too many people!” she said.

Though her first book was “very bad,” her later works have a devoted following. She’s currently in the middle of a series called the “School for Heiresses,” where young ladies of means learn how to avoid falling into the clutches of gold-digging rogues. But, as the covers of the novels show, they are not always successful.

“Will his wicked ways be her undoing?” asks the cover of “Never Seduce a Scoundrel,” the first book in the series. Probably. As for the male book jacket models, with their long hair and intense gazes?

“They’re too young for me,” Jeffries said. “They’re too airbrushed and hairless. For me, hair is macho!”

Jeffries’ parents are a bit queasy with some of their daughter’s work.

Her father read some of her suspense novels, written under the name Deborah Nicholas. But he skipped the sex scenes. Her mother doesn’t read her books at all.

“She’s really uncomfortable with them,” Jeffries said.

But then, Jeffries’ romances are steamy, even for the genre, she said.

In one of her latest books, the heroine and her lover discuss birth control, 19th-century style — condoms made from sheep gut, painstakingly soaked and stretched.

“You can find the recipe on the Internet!” Jeffries exclaimed, laughing. “I love the Internet.”

Readers have varying levels of comfort with explicit intimacy, she said, and as a genre fiction writer, she has to respect her readers’ needs.

“There’s things that people just don’t want,” she said. So no anti-heroes, no tragic endings.

But that’s not really what Jeffries wanted either.

“I didn’t want real life,” she said. “My life was very, very real.”