Amanda Foreman

At Oxford, Foreman completed an MPhil thesis Politics or Providence?: Why the Houses of Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade in 1807 (1993) and a DPhil with her thesis The political life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 1757–1806 (1998) which was then turned into her first biography.

Her parents were Evelyn (Smith) and the screenwriter and film producer Carl Foreman (1914–1984).

Her father moved to England to work after being blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios during the McCarthyism of the 1950s.

Her brother, Jonathan Foreman, is an international correspondent and film critic.

She has five children and is married to Jonathan Barton.

Amanda Foreman was educated at Hanford School, a girls' junior independent school in southwest England,

followed by various girls' boarding schools.

Amanda Lucy Foreman (born 1968) is a British/American biographer and historian.

Her books include Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, A World on Fire, and The World Made by Women.

She also wrote and starred in a four-part documentary regarding the role of women in society, entitled The Ascent of Woman.

Currently, she is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal bi-weekly 'Historically Speaking' and an Honorary Research Senior Fellow in the History Department at the University of Liverpool.

Foreman was born in London.

She attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, then Columbia University, before returning to England in 1991.

She was awarded a 1993 Henrietta Jex-Blake Senior Scholarship at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

After completing her DPhil, Foreman remained at Oxford as a researcher, and in 1998 she published her first book, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, based on her doctoral thesis.

Published by HarperCollins in the UK and Random House in the US, the book was an international best-seller and reached number one in the UK as a hardback, paperback, and reissue nine years later.

It was shortlisted for the 1998 Guardian First Book Award, and won the 1998 Whitbread Prize for Best Biography.

The book has been the subject of a television documentary, a radio play starring Judi Dench, and a film, The Duchess, starring Ralph Fiennes and Keira Knightley.

Foreman's most recent book, A World on Fire, a history of British-American relations in the American Civil War, was published in 2010 by Penguin in the UK on 30 June, and in 2011 by Random House in the US.

The book was a critical success in both countries and a national best-seller in the US.

Writing in The Guardian, Jay Parini stated, "One can hardly overestimate the brilliance of Foreman's conception, seeing this turning point in American history from a British viewpoint, drawing on a vast range of actors on this great stage, including lesser-known British sympathisers who fought on either side in this conflict or journalists."

Adam I.P. Smith of History Today said, "Amanda Foreman's magnificent new book . . . resembles nothing so much as War and Peace."

In a rare accolade, The New York Times Book Review awarded Foreman her second cover review.

Michael Burlingame of The Wall Street Journal heralded Foreman as "such an engaging writer that readers may find this 958-page volume too short".

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker wrote: "The pages fly like the wind – like Gone with the Wind – because there's so much life, so much action, and so many vivid people in them."

In 2011, A World on Fire was "highly commended" by the judges of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

It was chosen as a "Book of the Year" by The New Yorker and The Economist and named one of the "Ten Best Books of 2011" by The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and NPR.

In 2012, A World on Fire won the Fletcher Pratt Award for excellence in Civil War history writing.

It was a finalist for the 2012 Lincoln Prize, the Lionel Gelber Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

It was also nominated for the Jefferson Davis Prize.

In September 2015, The Ascent of Woman, Foreman's acclaimed four-part documentary regarding the role of women in society, was first aired on BBC 2.

The series received positive reviews, with The Telegraph calling it "powerful, inspiring, and important."

The series was subsequently programmed on Netflix in 2016.

Foreman's next book, The World Made by Women: A History of Women from the Apple to the Pill, is slated for publication by Random House (US) and Allen Lane (UK) in 2023.

She received her doctorate from Oxford University in 18th Century British History.

In 2018, twenty-five years after Queen Elizabeth II opened Buckingham Palace to the public during the summer months, Royal Collection Trust set a new precedent by inviting an outsider, Foreman, to curate an exhibition for the 2019 Buckingham Palace Summer Opening.

'Queen Victoria's Palace' opened on 18 July 2019.

The exhibition, which coincided with the 200th anniversary of Queen Victoria's birth, argued that Victoria's transformation of Buckingham Palace laid the foundations for the modern Monarchy.

The refurbished Palace reflected a new form of gendered power.

Victoria replaced the 'male' values of glory, wealth, lineage, and conquest with the 'female' values of family, duty, patriotism, and public service.