Linda Porter has a B.A. and a D.Phil from the University of York, where she studied under the direction of two inspirational professors, Gerald Aylmer and Gwyn A. Williams. She spent nearly ten years lecturing in New York, at Fordham and City Universities among others, before returning with her American husband and daughter to England, where she embarked on a complete change of career. For more than twenty years she worked as a senior public relations practitioner in BT, introducing a ground-breaking international public relations programme during the years of BT’s international expansion. The attractions of early retirement were too good to miss and she has gone back to historical writing, reviewing for the BBC History magazine and History Today. Her first book, Mary Tudor: The First Queen, has been published by Piatkus in the UK and is soon to be published by St. Martin's Press in the US under the title The First Queen of England: The Myth of "Bloody Mary". This is a personal history of Mary I, the eldest of Henry VIII’s three children. The book will show that the popular image of Bloody Mary, the evil queen who sent hundreds of Protestant martyrs to the stake and effectively sold her realm to Spain, is an invention of Elizabethan propagandists. It was deliberately fostered to contrast the supposed dark night of Mary’s short reign with the golden dawn of the Elizabethan era. The real Mary suffered much in her tragic life but her memory has suffered even more. A determined and courageous survivor, Mary’s life and reign deserve re-appraisal. Linda is the winner of the 2004-2005 Biographers Club prize.

Linda Porter lindaporter.net