Margaret George Books in Order

If you want her best single starting point: The Memoirs of Cleopatra
If you want Tudor court drama: The Autobiography of Henry VIII → Elizabeth I
If you want queens, rivalry, and palace politics: Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles → The Memoirs of Cleopatra → Elizabeth I
If you want the ancient world at full scale: Helen of Troy → The Confessions of Young Nero → The Splendor Before the Dark
If you want a spiritual, character-led novel: Mary, Called Magdalene

Margaret George was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but her childhood did not stay rooted in one place for long. When her father joined the U.S. diplomatic service, the family moved abroad, and before she was a teenager she had lived in Taiwan, Israel, and Germany, then later returned to Washington, DC, for high school. Those years put old places and old stories right in front of her, so history never felt distant or dusty.

History got to her early.

George has said she started writing novels in Israel after she ran out of books to read. She was still a child, filling legal pads and illustrating them herself, and one early rejection even came with a kindly note saying she had talent but needed to work on her spelling. That mix of seriousness and persistence seems to have stayed with her. So did another childhood interest, tortoises, which would later turn up in her life and even in her writing for younger readers.

At Tufts University she studied both English literature and biology, then went on to earn an MA in ecology at Stanford. That unusual pairing matters when you read her novels. She cares about language, but she also cares about evidence, bodies, medicine, and the practical details of how people lived. Before publishing fiction, she worked as a science writer at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

The leap into historical fiction came after marriage had moved her from Bethesda to St. Louis. There, she had the idea of writing a 'psycho-biography' of Henry VIII, partly because she felt he had been judged almost entirely through the words of his enemies. She researched for years, read deeply in Tudor scholarship, and took fourteen years from that first spark to the publication of The Autobiography of Henry VIII in 1986.

Big lives and long books turned out to be her natural form.

From there, George built a body of work around people history tends to flatten into labels. Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles follows Mary Stuart from French court glitter to imprisonment and execution. The Memoirs of Cleopatra gives Egypt's last queen a sharp, intimate voice, and later became a television miniseries. Mary, Called Magdalene looks at faith, gender, and devotion through one of the most argued-over figures in Christian history. In Helen of Troy and Elizabeth I, she does something similar again, taking women who are already half myth and making them feel human, political, lonely, impulsive, and vividly alive.

She has said she enjoys characters the public misunderstands, and that idea runs straight through her books. Even the Nero novels, The Confessions of Young Nero and The Splendor Before the Dark, are less interested in easy villainy than in how power, fear, performance, and rumor can shape a life. Readers often come to George for scale, but stay for the voice. Her books are huge, yes, yet they are built around a simple pleasure: the feeling that a famous dead person has sat down and decided to tell you what it was like.

Research is a big part of the fun for her. She has written about racing in an ancient Greek stadium, attending gladiator training in Rome, and following the practical mysteries of things like snake venom while working on Cleopatra. That curiosity keeps the novels grounded, even when the subjects are legendary.

George lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband, and by all accounts she still keeps plenty of books, and still has a soft spot for tortoises.