Miranda Seymour

Another unusual life she traced was of a 1930s film star, Virginia Cherrill, based on a substantial archive in private ownership.

Miranda Jane Seymour (born 8 August 1948) is an English literary critic, novelist and biographer.

The lives she has described have included those of Robert Graves and Mary Shelley.

Seymour, a former Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has in recent years been a visiting Professor of English Studies at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

She elected to resign from the Royal Society of Literature in December 2023.

Miranda Seymour was two years old when her parents moved into Thrumpton Hall, the family ancestral home, a Jacobean mansion in the quiet village of Thrumpton, Nottinghamshire, on the south bank of the River Trent.

She studied at Bedford College, London, now part of Royal Holloway, University of London, earning a BA in English in 1981.

Seymour's works include biographies of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mary Shelley and Robert Graves, about whom she also wrote a novel, The Telling and a radio play, Sea Music.

She wrote a group portrait of Henry James in his later years, entitled A Ring of Conspirators.

In 2001, she came across material on Hellé Nice, a forgotten French Grand Prix racing driver of the 1930s.

After extensive research, Seymour published an acclaimed book in 2004 about Nice's ultimately tragic life.

In 2008 she published In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love (Simon & Schuster, UK), which appeared in the US as Thrumpton Hall (HarperCollins) and won the 2008 Pen Ackerley Prize for Memoir of the Year.

Noble Endeavours: Stories from England; Stories from Germany appeared in September 2013 from Simon & Schuster.

Seymour's In Byron's Wake (2018) covers the lives of Lord Byron's wife and daughter, Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace.

I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys was published by Harper Collins in 2022.

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