Eloisa James

Eloisa James is the pen name of Mary Bly (born 1962). She is a tenured Shakespeare professor at Fordham University who also writes best-selling Regency and Georgian romance novels under her pen name. Her novels are published in 30 countries and have sold approximately 7 million copies worldwide. She also wrote a bestselling memoir about the year her family spent in France, Paris in Love.

She is the daughter of poet Robert Bly and short-story author Carol Bly.

Early life and education Mary Bly was born in Minnesota in 1962, the daughter of Robert Bly, winner of the American Book Award for poetry, and Carol Bly, a short story author. She was the inspiration for her mother's essay "The Maternity Wing, Madison, Minnesota", which was published in the anthology Imagining Home: Writing From the Midwest. She has three younger siblings, Bridget, Noah, and Micah.

The Bly family did not own a television but did own more than 5,000 books. Robert often read to his children, exposing them to classics such as Beowulf. Even at a young age, however, Bly was fascinated with romance. Throughout her childhood, she wrote and produced plays, using her siblings as the cast, and charging admission to any adults in the household (poets came often, visiting her father). The plays always ended in a romance, if only because her sister insisted on being a princess. To entertain her siblings during a snowstorm, she once wrote and built a puppet show, complete with lights, that also featured a romance. After discovering the romance novels of Georgette Heyer in her local library, Bly convinced her father to allow her to read one romance novel for each classic novel she read. She specializes in bawdy puns found in English boys' plays written between 1600 and 1608. In addition to publishing an academic book with Oxford University Press, she has published an academic article on 17th-century drama in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.

Romance novelist While attending the University of Virginia on a humanities fellowship, Bly began writing romance novels. Her second career began when her husband wished to postpone having a second child until they had paid off their student loans. To speed the process, Bly followed her parents' examples and wrote a story to send to a publisher. netting Bly an advance that paid off her student loans in full. Bly made the decision to publish her fiction books under a pseudonym, Eloisa James, to keep her academic life separate from her fiction writing. She has written 30 novels, 27 of which were New York Times bestsellers. Her books have since been translated into 28 languages and 30 countries and have become hardcover bestsellers in the Netherlands and Spain.

Bly's first three novels, the Pleasures Trilogy, were published in hardcover by Dell, a plan with which Bly did not fully agree. Following the publication of those three novels, she bought out the remainder of her contract and moved to Avon, where her books are now published in mass market paperback format. She believed that marketing her first works as hardcovers was not a truly successful plan and hoped to have more success with the mass-market paperbacks.

The inspiration for her novels comes in part from her academic career, as plays or facts discovered during her academic research often spark ideas for fictional plots. As she spends much of her day teaching about or reading early British English, she feels that the language choices she makes in her novels are more authentic.

The characters in Bly's novels often dispense with the typical romance novel stereotypes, with characters that care about religion and a focus on historical accuracy. Her heroines are usually surrounded by very good female friends or sisters. Most of her novels are part of a trilogy or set of four novels that focus on a set of interconnected characters, and explores the relationships between those characters as well as that of the hero and heroine.

In 2018, Apple Books included her novel, Too Wilde to Wed, on its list of 10 Best Books of 2018.

Dual careers

For several years Bly's second career remained a secret, and she disguised herself by wearing contacts instead of her typical glasses when she attended functions as Eloisa James.

Bly credits her success in dual careers to being "very, very organized". On her days at home, Bly schedules time to work on both her fiction and her academic works. When possible, she does not work when her children are at home.

Bly is married to Alessandro Vettori, an Italian knight (or cavaliere) The family lives primarily in New York but spends summers in Tuscany visiting Alessandro's mother and sister.