Daisy Goodwin Books in Order
Explore Daisy Goodwin books in order, with quick summaries, series background, and where to start, from her historical novels to her poetry collections.
Last updated: June 7, 2026
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Publication Order
20 books
The Nation's Favourite Love Poems
by Daisy Goodwin
1997
This anthology gathers one hundred well-known love poems, moving from flirtation and devotion to loss and regret. It is a broad, readable collection that treats romance as poets usually do, with equal parts intensity, wit, and sorrow.
101 Poems That Could Save Your Life
by Daisy Goodwin
1999
This anthology is designed as emotional first aid, pairing poems with the rough patches of ordinary life. It gathers classic and modern voices to offer comfort, perspective, and the sense that someone else has felt this before.
101 Poems to Keep You Sane
by Daisy Goodwin
2001
A pocket antidote to stress, this collection rounds up poems for frayed nerves and overfull days. Goodwin's selections aim to steady the mind, lift the mood, and prove that a few well-chosen lines can still calm a busy life.
The Nation's Favourite Animal Poems
by Daisy Goodwin
2001
This themed anthology brings together poems about animals in all their forms, wild, working, cherished, and mourned. The selections range from affectionate and funny to reflective, using animals to say something larger about human feeling.
101 Poems to Help You Understand Men
by Daisy Goodwin
2002
This playful anthology tackles love, frustration, longing, and the battle of the sexes through poetry. The mix ranges from witty to rueful, making room for romance, irritation, and the moments when nobody quite understands anybody else.
101 Poems to Get You Through the Day
by Daisy Goodwin
2003
Arranged around the rhythms of a modern day, this anthology moves from getting up to office politics to late-night moods. It offers short bursts of poetry for the moments when daily life feels comic, exhausting, or oddly touching.
Essential Poems (To Fall in Love With)
by Daisy Goodwin
2003
From first attraction to heartbreak, this anthology gathers poems for every stage of love. Some celebrate passion, some deal in disappointment, but together they make a smart, wide-ranging companion to romance in all its forms.
Poems To Last A Lifetime
by Daisy Goodwin
2004
Goodwin opens up the anthology format into a larger treasury, choosing poems for many ages and moods. It is built as a book to live with, one that can console, amuse, and be returned to at different points in life.
Essential Poems For Children
by Daisy Goodwin
2005
A family-friendly selection for reading aloud or browsing alone, this anthology brings together poems that are lively, memorable, and easy to love. It is pitched at younger readers, but there is plenty here for parents to enjoy too.
Essential Poems For The Way We Live Now
by Daisy Goodwin
2005
This collection looks at everyday British life through poetry, from weather and queues to food, travel, and the national sense of humor. Old and newer poems sit side by side to make the familiar feel freshly observed.
Bringing Up Baby
by Daisy Goodwin
2007
Faced with a blizzard of expert advice, Goodwin offers a calmer guide to the first months of parenthood. Drawing on the experience of real parents, she covers sleep, feeding, and daily survival with wit and reassurance.
Silver River
by Daisy Goodwin
2007
In this memoir, Goodwin follows her family's tangled history across England, Ireland, and Argentina while trying to understand her absent mother. It is both a family investigation and a personal search for where loss, loyalty, and identity begin.
Off By Heart
by Daisy Goodwin
2009
Created alongside the poetry project of the same name, this anthology encourages children to learn and perform poems aloud. It mixes classic and contemporary pieces and shows how memorizing a poem can turn it into something personal and lasting.
My Last Duchess
by Daisy Goodwin
2010
Cora Cash is the richest girl in America, but money cannot buy the title her mother wants for her. After marrying an English duke, she discovers that aristocratic glamour comes with cold rules, hidden motives, and a marriage built on shaky ground.
The Duchess's Tattoo
by Daisy Goodwin
2011
In this short story linked to My Last Duchess, Cora Cash tries to master the strange codes of English high society. A fashionable tattoo seems like the answer, until a discreet artist realizes she does not know what the symbol truly means.
The Fortune Hunter
by Daisy Goodwin
2013
Charlotte Baird would rather be a photographer than a prize heiress, but her fortune makes her a target. When charming horseman Bay Middleton is drawn toward both Charlotte and Empress Sisi, desire and ambition turn the hunting field into dangerous ground.
100 Poems To See You Through
by Daisy Goodwin
2014
This anthology gathers poems for illness, grief, bad news, and the hard work of carrying on. Organized by theme, it is meant to offer a little steadiness and language when ordinary conversation is not quite enough.
Victoria
by Daisy Goodwin
2016
In 1837, eighteen-year-old Victoria wakes to find herself queen, and suddenly free of the controlling household that shaped her childhood. As she learns to rule, she must navigate court politics, Lord Melbourne's influence, and the arrival of Prince Albert.
Victoria and Albert - A Royal Love Affair
by Daisy Goodwin
2017
This illustrated companion goes behind the scenes of Goodwin's royal drama, focusing on Victoria and Albert's marriage. It mixes character profiles, interviews, diary material, and costume and set detail for readers who want more of the world around the story.
Diva
by Daisy Goodwin
2024
Goodwin turns to Maria Callas, tracing the opera star's rise, fierce discipline, and affair with Aristotle Onassis. Set against the glitter of the 1950s and 1960s, the novel asks what happens when love collides with genius, fame, and ambition.
Where should I start?
If you want stately Gilded Age drama: My Last Duchess → The Fortune Hunter
If you want young Queen Victoria first: Victoria → Victoria and Albert - A Royal Love Affair
If you want brilliant, complicated women at the center: Victoria → Diva
If you want comfort reading and poetry: 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life → 100 Poems To See You Through
Author bio
Daisy Goodwin was born in London and grew up there in a family where books, film, and design all felt close at hand. Her father was the film producer Richard Goodwin, and her mother was the writer and decorator Jocasta Innes. She has often said that creative people drifted through her childhood, which helps explain why her own work moves so easily between television, fiction, memoir, and poetry.
She read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and one university assignment ended up shaping a huge part of her writing life. Asked to look at Queen Victoria's diaries for a project on the monarchy and the media, she expected something dry and dutiful. Instead she found a funny, passionate young woman whose private voice felt alive on the page.
History got there first.
After Cambridge, Goodwin studied at Columbia film school as a Harkness Scholar and then joined the BBC in 1985. She spent years making arts documentaries before moving into the independent television world, where she helped create shows including Grand Designs and Escape to the Country. In 2005 she founded Silver River Productions, later sold to Sony, after building a career that mixed cultural programming with a sharp sense of what large audiences actually enjoy.
Poetry came first in print. Goodwin edited a run of anthologies that tried to bring poems out of the classroom and back into ordinary life, books like 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life, Essential Poems (To Fall in Love With), and 100 Poems To See You Through. The appeal was simple and smart: there is usually a poem for heartbreak, panic, love, bad news, boredom, or the strange mood of an ordinary afternoon.
Then came the novels.
Her debut, My Last Duchess, published in North America as The American Heiress, follows Cora Cash, a rich American who marries into the English aristocracy and discovers that a title solves less than it promises. Readers tend to enjoy the sharp social detail and the way Goodwin writes money, rank, longing, and private disappointment side by side. The Fortune Hunter stays in the nineteenth century, this time mixing photography, scandal, and a dangerous romantic triangle around Empress Elisabeth of Austria.
With Victoria, Goodwin returned to the monarch who first hooked her at Cambridge. The book, and then the television series she created and wrote, focus on Victoria as a young woman learning how to rule while dealing with her mother, Lord Melbourne, Prince Albert, and the heavy performance of monarchy. Much later, Diva turned to Maria Callas, another woman trying to hold on to talent, authority, and self-respect while the world watched.
That pattern runs through almost everything she writes. Goodwin is drawn to women in public, women with appetite and ambition, women who are expected to play a part while also trying to remain themselves. She has also written the memoir Silver River and the parenting guide Bringing Up Baby, which shows how wide her range really is.
Goodwin continues to write novels, screen work, and journalism. She lives in England with her husband, daughters, and dogs. The thread connecting the work is still the same one: she likes strong stories, emotional truth, and women who refuse to stay flat on the page.
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