Paula Byrne
Paula Byrne, born in Birkenhead in 1967, is a British author and biographer most famous for her bestseller Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson. Her debut book was the highly-acclaimed study of Jane Austen, Jane Austen and the Theatre, which was published in 2002 by Hambledon and reissued in paperback in 2007 by Continuum. Byrne has a PhD from the University of Liverpool. Before becoming an author, she taught in a school, college and university.
In 2005 her biography Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson was featured on the Richard & Judy Book Club on Channel 4.
Her book Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead is to be published by HarperPress on August 20, 2009. An excerpt was published in the Sunday Times of August 9 under the headline Sex scandal behind Brideshead Revisited. It has to do with Lord Beauchamp William, 7th Earl of Beauchamp, who was the father of Waugh's friend Hugh Lygon. Its stated thesis is "that the exiled Lord Marchmain [a character in Brideshead Revisited] was a version of Boom [Lord Beauchamp] and Lady Marchmain of the Countess Beauchamp, that the dissolute Sebastian Flyte was Hugh and other Lygon siblings matched other roles." Presumably the book identifies other real-life bases for events and characters in Waugh's novel.
Byrne lives in a Warwickshire village near Stratford-upon-Avon and is married to the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate with whom she has three young children.