Miranda Jane Seymour (born 8 August 1948) is an English literary critic, novelist, and biographer. Miranda Seymour was two years old when her parents moved into Thrumpton Hall, the family's ancestral home in Nottinghamshire. This celebrated Jacobean mansion is on the south bank of the River Trent at the secluded village of Thrumpton. Miranda was raised by a father, George Fitzroy Seymour, who loved racing motorbikes and classic cars, aided by living not far from the famous Donington Park racetrack. An author of children's books, novels, and prizewinning biographies, Miranda Seymour began writing at a young age. In addition to her own works, she has written reviews and articles for a number of leading newspapers and literary journals, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The London Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Economist and The Guardian, among others. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in recent years, a visiting Professor of English Studies at the Nottingham Trent University, Seymour is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1972 she married the novelist and historian Andrew Annandale Sinclair and had a son, Merlin; her second marriage, to Anthony Gottlieb, executive editor of The Economist and author of a history of Western philosophy, ended in 2003. A transatlantic literary roomswap has led to her third marriage, in 2006, to Ted Lynch, a Bostonian. Miranda Seymour now divides her time between London and Thrumpton Hall, now dually used by the family and as a business and wedding venue. In 2001, Miranda Seymour came across material on Hellé Nice, a long forgotten French Grand Prix racing driver from the 1930s. Her interest piqued, she travelled to France and after extensive research, in 2004 Seymour published a highly acclaimed book about Hellé Nice's extraordinary and ultimately tragic life. Her most recent publication is In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love (Simon and Schuster, UK) She is currently writing the life of a thirties film star.
Partial bibliography (biographies)
- In My Father's House (2007)
- The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend (2004)
- Brief History of Thyme (2002)
- Mary Shelley (2001)
- The Summer of '39 (1998) published in the UK as The Telling
- Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (1995)
- Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (1993)
- The Reluctant Devil (1994)
- A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and his literary circle, 1895-1915 (1988)
