Lucy Worsley Books in Order

If you love Tudor court drama for teens: Eliza Rose (also published as Maid of the King’s Court) → Lady Mary
If you want royal coming of age stories: My Name Is Victoria → Queen Victoria → Encounters with Victoria
If you enjoy the hidden history of everyday life and crime: If Walls Could Talk → The Art of the English Murder
If you prefer deep dives into famous writers: Jane Austen at Home → Agatha Christie
If you like place based royal history: Hardwick Old Hall → Bolsover Castle → Hampton Court Palace → The Story of Hampton Court Palace

Lucy Worsley is an English historian, author and broadcaster who has spent much of her career bringing old buildings and royal stories to life. Trained as a curator, she became a familiar face on television while continuing to write books for adults and children.

She was born on 18 December 1973 in Reading, Berkshire, where her father taught geology at the university and her mother worked in educational policy. Growing up, she attended schools in Reading, Newbury and Nottingham, and discovered that history could be about politics, work and family life as much as about kings and battles.

As a teenager she was the sort of child who always had her head in a book, especially historical novels. She briefly tried science subjects at school to please her father, but switched back to history and went on to study Ancient and Modern History at New College, Oxford, graduating with a first class degree in 1995.

After Oxford she spent a summer as a curator at Milton Manor, a historic house near Abingdon, and then joined English Heritage as an inspector of historic buildings in the East Midlands. Alongside that work she completed a doctorate at the University of Sussex on the architectural patronage of William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, research that later became her book Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion and Great Houses.

In 2002 she moved to Glasgow Museums as a project manager, and the following year became chief curator, later joint chief curator, at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that cares for the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace and other royal sites. Over more than two decades she helped to shape exhibitions, refurbishments and visitor experiences before announcing in 2024 that she would step back from the role to focus on broadcasting and writing full time.

She likes to joke that she is just an historian who wandered into TV, rather than a born presenter.

Her broadcasting career began with series such as If Walls Could Talk, Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency and Harlots, Housewives and Heroines, in which she uses costume, props and the spaces of historic buildings to explain how people once lived. Later programmes on royal myths, palace secrets and big turning points in British history made her a regular presence on BBC and PBS schedules.

Alongside television work she has written a steady stream of books. For general readers these include If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, a tour of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and living rooms over eight centuries, and A Very British Murder or, in the United States, The Art of the English Murder, a history of the country's appetite for true crime and detective fiction. She has also produced detailed studies of the royal courts in Courtiers and of the seventeenth century duke William Cavendish in Cavalier.

More recently she has turned to large scale biographies. Jane Austen at Home looks at the novelist through the houses she lived in and imagined, Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow reconstructs the monarch's life through a series of key days, and Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman explores how the crime writer's adventurous, sometimes painful experiences sat behind the image of a modest country lady.

Worsley is equally committed to writing for younger readers. Novels such as Eliza Rose, Maid of the King's Court, My Name Is Victoria, Lady Mary and The Austen Girls put girls and young women at the center of Tudor and Georgian stories, reflecting her declared “stealth mission” to make teenage girls interested in history and to show them that they can push against the limits around them.

Her work has brought a string of honours, from a Royal Television Society nomination and an honorary doctorate from Sussex University to an appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2018 for services to history and heritage. She has also fronted a BAFTA winning programme about the suffragettes and continues to develop new documentary and podcast projects.

At home, she lives in Southwark beside the River Thames with her husband, architect Mark Hines, in what she has described as a minimalist loft style flat. She speaks openly about being child free by choice, still runs for exercise as she did in her cross country days as a teenager, and has turned a minor speech impediment into a familiar part of her on screen presence rather than something to hide.

Taken together, her curatorial background, gently feminist eye and obvious delight in dressing up and telling stories have made her a bridge between academic history and a wide popular audience. Whether she is exploring an empty palace, unpacking a murder case or following the footsteps of Austen and Christie, the aim is the same, to make the past feel close, human and worth arguing about.