Lisa Klein Books in Order

If you want her Shakespeare retellings first: Ophelia → Lady Macbeth's Daughter
If you prefer historical fiction rooted in real events: Two Girls of Gettysburg → Cate of the Lost Colony
If you want the lightest, most playful entry point: Love Disguised → Ophelia
If you're curious about her nonfiction side: The Exemplary Sidney And The Elizabethan Sonneteer → Be It Remembered

Lisa Klein grew up in Peoria, Illinois, and books were part of her life early. She studied English and Theology at Marquette University, then earned a Ph.D. in literature from Indiana University. Her academic work on Renaissance poetry later became The Exemplary Sidney And The Elizabethan Sonneteer.

Before she became a novelist, she spent years in the classroom.

Klein taught Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at The Ohio State University. She also researched the writing, domestic culture, and everyday lives of Renaissance women. That scholarly background helps explain why her fiction is so interested in the people, especially women, who stand just off to the side of the better-known version of a story.

One play kept nagging at her, Hamlet. She had taught it many times, and she was dissatisfied with how little space Ophelia gets to speak for herself. After she left university teaching, she still wanted an outlet for the reading, research, and historical curiosity that had shaped her work, so she turned to fiction and started with Shakespeare.

The shift was not as sudden as it sounds. Around that same turning point, she wrote Be It Remembered, a history of Trinity Episcopal Church in Columbus. Research was already second nature to her. What changed was the form, from scholarship and local history to narrative built around voice, emotion, and suspense.

Then came Ophelia, her first published novel, in 2006.

It is still the book many readers connect with her first. The idea is simple and strong, what if Ophelia had more wit, more will, and more story than Hamlet allows? Klein turns a tragic supporting figure into the center of the action, mixing secret love, court danger, and a fight for survival. The novel later became the basis for a film adaptation, which brought her version of the character to a wider audience. She has said that accuracy mattered to her when writing these Shakespeare-based books, even down to the flavor of the language.

She kept building on that approach in later novels. Lady Macbeth's Daughter imagines a daughter for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and turns a brutal Scottish power struggle into a story about identity, prophecy, and conscience. Two Girls of Gettysburg moves to the American Civil War and follows cousins pulled toward opposite loyalties as battle closes in around them. Cate of the Lost Colony heads to Roanoke, where court politics, colonization, survival, and romance all collide.

Klein can be playful, too.

That lighter side shows up in Love Disguised, which uses young Will Shakespeare, hidden identities, and romantic confusion for a livelier comic mood. Even there, though, you can see the same interests that run through the rest of her work: smart young women, strict social rules, and history used as something lived rather than memorized. Readers who like Klein often like the mix she offers, strong heroines, solid historical texture, and stories that invite them back to Shakespeare or to the past with fresh curiosity. She lives in Ohio with her family.