Miranda Seymour
# Miranda Seymour

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 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.

## Early life and education

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.

## Career

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

