P A U L A B Y R N E

Paula Byrne is the author of the top ten bestseller Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (HarperCollins UK, Random House USA). A selection for the 2005 Richard and Judy Book Club and a British Book Awards ‘Best Read’ nomination, Perdita was also long-listed for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize. It tells the extraordinary story of the eighteenth-century actress, poet, novelist, feminist, celebrity and royal mistress Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson (1757-1800).

Paula is also the author of Jane Austen and the Theatre, published in 2002 and reissued in paperback in 2007 by Hambledon Continuum. Paul Johnson of The Spectator chose it as his best-ever book on Jane Austen and the Times Literary Supplement described as a ‘definitive and pioneering study of a wholly neglected aspect of Austen’s art.’ She has also edited a Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Jane Austen's 'Emma'.

Paula, who is married to the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, has taught in school, college and university, but is now a full-time writer, represented by Andrew Wylie. She has three young children and lives in a Warwickshire village near Stratford-upon-Avon. She has published essays on a wide range of women authors, reviews for the Sunday Telegraph and the TLS, and is now writing an innovative biography of Evelyn Waugh, focused on his relationship with the family who inspired Brideshead Revisited, to be published worldwide by HarperCollins in 2009.