Eloisa James

Eloisa James is the pen name of Mary Bly (born 1962), an American author of historical romance who is also a Shakespeare professor at Fordham University in New York City.

Bly was born in Minnesota, the daughter of the poet Robert Bly and the short story writer Carol Bly. She studied at Harvard, took an MPhil at Oxford and a PhD in Renaissance studies at Yale before an academic career at Fordham, where she holds tenure and has led graduate English studies and the creative writing programme.

Her first novel, Potent Pleasures, appeared in 1999 as the opening book of the Pleasures trilogy; Open Library lists Delacorte Press and Dell among its early publishers, with a Piatkus edition later in the UK. Her best-known series include Desperate Duchesses, nine novels beginning with Desperate Duchesses (Avon, 2007), and the Fairy Tales sequence, which starts with A Kiss at Midnight (Avon, 2010). She also wrote the memoir Paris in Love (Random House, 2012), about a year her family spent in France. Her publisher describes her as a New York Times bestselling author.

For collectors. Her series novels from 2007 onwards were first published in the United States by Avon, while the Pleasures trilogy first appeared from Delacorte Press and Dell; British publishers such as Piatkus issued their own editions. Anyone building a set of first printings will therefore be looking mainly for American editions.