Miranda Seymour

Miranda Jane Seymour (born August 8, 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. An author of children's books, novels, and several biographies, Miranda Seymour has also contributed to a number of leading newspapers and literary journals, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Economist. 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 Sinclair and had a son, Merlin; her second marriage, to Anthony Gottlieb, then executive editor of The Economist and author of a history of Western philosophy, ended in 2003. A transatlantic literary room-swap has led to her third marriage, in 2006, to Ted Lynch, a Bostonian. Miranda Seymour divides her time between London and Thrumpton Hall, now dually used by the family and for weddings and corporate events.

In 2001, Miranda Seymour came across material on Hellé Nice, a glamorous, long forgotten French Grand Prix racing driver from the 1930s. After extensive research on a well-buried subject, Seymour published a highly acclaimed book (2004) 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). The same book is published in the US as Thrumpton Hall (Harper Collins)^[1] and has won the 2008 Pen Ackerley Prize for Memoir of the Year. Always attracted by unusual and challenging subjects, she has most recently published the life of a thirties film star, Virginia Cherrill, basing her work upon a substantial archive in private ownership.

Bibliography

Fiction

• The Stones of Maggiare (1975)
• Count Manfred (1976)
• Daughter of Darkness (1977)
• Goddess (1979)
• Madonna of the Island (1980)
• Medea (1981)
• Carrying On (1984)
• The Reluctant Devil (1990)
• The Summer of '39 (1998) published in the UK as The Telling

Juvenile fiction

• Mumtaz the Magical Cat (1984)
• Caspar and the Secret Kingdom (1986)
• The Vampire of Verdonia (1986)
• Pierre and the Pamplemousse (1989)

Non fiction

• A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and his literary circle, 1895-1915 (1988)
• Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (1993)
• Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (1995)
• Mary Shelley (2001)
• Brief History of Thyme (2002)
• The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend (2004)
• In My Father's House (2007) Thrumpton Hall in the US (2008)
• Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill (2009)

References

1. ^ Mcgrath, Reviewed By Charles (27 July 2008). "House Proud". The New York Times: p. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/review/McGrath-t.html. Retrieved 11 August 2011. 

External links

• Official homepage
• Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National 1 April 2007
• 'The Knife by the Handle at Last' Tim Parks review of Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House from The New York Review of Books

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Name	Seymour, Miranda
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Date of birth	August 8, 1948
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