Stephanie Dray Books in Order

Stephanie Dray writes historical fiction about women caught in the middle of political upheaval. Her novels move from ancient Egypt and imperial Rome to Revolutionary America, wartime France, and the New Deal. Along the way, she has become a bestselling, award-winning author whose books have been translated into many languages. She now lives in Maryland with her husband, cats, and history books.

She has said she was a storyteller long before she was a published novelist. Family history mattered early. Her relatives came to America from Europe, carrying stories of poverty, persecution, and survival. Her grandparents' memories of the Great Depression, and her grandfathers' service after Pearl Harbor, gave her a lasting interest in republics under strain, moral choice, and the ordinary people who get swept into turning points.

That sense of history as something lived at the kitchen table still runs through her work.

Before fiction became her full-time path, Dray worked as a lawyer, a game designer, and a teacher. She is also a Smith College graduate. Those stops help explain some of the range in her books: they are deeply researched, interested in institutions and power, but also easy to read, emotionally direct, and alert to how public events press on private lives.

Her debut, Lily of the Nile, introduced readers to Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Dray followed it with Song of the Nile and Daughters of the Nile, a trilogy that blends court intrigue, Roman politics, danger, and a touch of the mystical through the worship of Isis. These books set an early pattern for her fiction, women history left at the margins stepping back into the center of the story.

She has also enjoyed working with other historical novelists. A Year of Ravens, written with a team of authors, revisits Boudica's revolt through a chorus of Roman and British voices. Even in a shared project, Dray's interests are easy to spot: women under pressure, empires in crisis, and the complicated space between personal loyalty and public violence.

She has a real gift for finding women who were present all along, but rarely handed the microphone.

That gift is especially clear in her collaborations with Laura Kamoie. In America's First Daughter, they follow Martha 'Patsy' Jefferson Randolph through love, family duty, and the burden of guarding her father's reputation. My Dear Hamilton gives Eliza Schuyler Hamilton her own full life on the page, and A Founding Mother turns to Abigail Adams, showing how much political history rested on a woman running a household, a marriage, and a nation's argument at once.

In her later solo work, Dray keeps widening the frame. The Women of Chateau Lafayette ties together three women across generations through one French chateau, while Becoming Madam Secretary follows Frances Perkins from early reform work in New York to national power. Across all these books, the appeal is consistent. Dray writes big historical stories, but she keeps them human, intimate, and close to the daily decisions that change a life.