Susan Holloway Scott Books in Order

Susan Holloway Scott was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in northern New Jersey, in a place where colonial history never felt very far away. Old houses, old stories, and the long afterlife of the American past seem to have stayed with her.

She studied art before earning a B.A. in art history from Brown University. That visual training shows up all through her fiction. Her books pay close attention to portraits, clothing, rooms, and the small objects people handle every day, the details that make the past feel lived in rather than distant.

Before she was publishing novels, she worked in college communications, including jobs connected to Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and Bryn Mawr. Then writing took over. She wrote her first novel while on maternity leave, sold it, and began publishing historical romance in 1992 under the pen name Miranda Jarrett.

That was the start.

As Miranda Jarrett, she went on to write more than thirty historical romances. Books like Columbine, The Captain's Bride, Wishing, and The Very Daring Duchess show what readers often enjoy most in her work: strong heroines, lively settings, a real feel for the period, and stories that move. Some are set in colonial America, some in Regency and Georgian England, and many involve ships, travel, family loyalties, or people trying to build a life after everything has gone sideways.

Later, writing as Susan Holloway Scott, she shifted more fully into biographical historical fiction. Her Restoration novels, Duchess, Royal Harlot, The King's Favorite, The French Mistress, and The Countess and the King, focus on women close to power in seventeenth-century England. These are not just costume dramas about kings and court scandal. They are books about ambition, survival, friendship, sex, money, politics, and what it costs a woman to matter in a world run by men.

She likes the women history remembers only in passing.

That same instinct shapes her American novels. I, Eliza Hamilton looks at Alexander Hamilton through the eyes of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, while The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr turns to Mary Emmons, a woman long pushed to the margins of the story. Martha continues that interest in well-known history seen from a woman's angle. Readers who like Scott usually talk about the same things: the research feels solid, the emotions are easy to follow, and the women at the center of the books come across as people first, not museum figures.

She has also written as Isabella Bradford, and across her different names she has published more than fifty novels and novellas. Her books have reached millions of readers and have been published internationally, but what feels most consistent is the kind of story she returns to: women making hard choices inside the limits of their time.

She now lives with her family outside Philadelphia in what she has described as a book-filled house. That fits. Even away from the novels themselves, she is clearly drawn to the texture of the past, from clothing and furniture to food, travel, and the practical business of everyday life. It is one reason her fiction feels so grounded.