Eloisa James

Eloisa James is the pen name of Mary Bly, an American author of Regency and historical romance.

Born in Minnesota in 1962 to the poet Robert Bly and the short-story writer Carol Bly, she studied at Harvard, earned an M.Phil. at Oxford and a Ph.D. at Yale, and became a Shakespeare scholar; Oxford University Press published her academic book in 2000.

She began publishing fiction under a pseudonym while still an untenured professor, to keep her two careers apart, and later left Fordham University to write full time.

Her novels, among them the Desperate Duchesses, Essex Sisters, Pleasures and Wildes of Lindow Castle series, have appeared on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists and been translated into dozens of languages. She lives in New York City and Florence, Italy.