Jenny Uglow grew up in Cumbria and Dorset and studied English at Oxford. She is now Editorial Director of Chatto & Windus, part of Random House.

Her books include Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, Hogarth: A Life and a World , The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future, and Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick. She's also editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women and The Vintage Book of Ghosts, and author of short studies of George Eliot and Henry Fielding, as well as A Little History of British Gardening and Words & Pictures, a look at relationships between writers and artists, from the illustrators of Milton and Bunyan, to Dickens and Phiz and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.

Her latest book is a study of Charles II and the tumultuous first decade of the restoration – A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration – including the plague, the Fire of London and the Dutch war. (October 2009).

Jenny also reviews for press and radio and has been a historical consultant on BBC classic serials, including Wives and Daughters, Daniel Deronda, The Way We Live Now, He Knew He was Right, North and South, Bleak House, Lost in Austen and Little Dorrit, as well as the films of Pride and Prejudice, Amazing Grace and Miss Potter.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was created an OBE in 2007. She is married to Steve Uglow, Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Kent: they live in Canterbury and have four grown-up children — Tom, Hannah, Jamie and Luke - and one grand-daughter, Matilda.