Eloisa James

Eloisa James is the pen name of Mary Bly, an American academic and New York Times bestselling historical romance novelist who has spent her career balancing two parallel identities: as Eloisa James she writes Regency and Georgian-era romance, and as Mary Bly she is a professor of English literature specializing in Shakespeare, formerly chairing the English department at Fordham University. She has written and spoken publicly about maintaining both careers, including in her memoir Paris in Love, which chronicled a sabbatical year spent living in France with her family. Her romance fiction is known for combining traditional Regency conventions — dukes, debutantes, marriage-mart politics — with a literary sensibility shaped by her academic background, and she has published numerous interconnected series exploring the English aristocracy's romantic entanglements. She is one of three authors, alongside Julia Quinn and Connie Brockway, behind the Lady Most duology (The Lady Most Likely... and The Lady Most Willing...), collaborative novels in which each author wrote a distinct storyline that interweaves with the others across a shared house-party setting. James has been a consistent bestseller in the historical romance genre for years and continues to publish new series while maintaining her academic post.