Alison Weir is a British author and public historian.
18 Facts About Alison Weir
1.
2.
Alison Weir primarily writes about the history of English royal women and families, in the form of biographies that explore their historical setting.
3.
Alison Weir's first work, Britain's Royal Families, was a genealogical overview of the British royal family.
4.
Alison Weir subsequently wrote biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, Katherine Swynford, Elizabeth of York, and the Princes in the Tower.
5.
Alison Weir has been married to Rankin Weir since 1972, and now lives in Surrey.
6.
Alison Weir recalls how, at the age of fourteen, she read Lozania Prole's Henry's Golden Queen, a "really trashy" novel about the life of Catherine of Aragon.
7.
Alison Weir then became interested in the field of history.
8.
Alison Weir was educated at City of London School for Girls and North Western Polytechnic, becoming a history teacher.
9.
Alison Weir opted to abandon teaching as a career after a disillusion with "trendy teaching methods", so she worked as a civil servant, and later as a housewife and mother.
10.
Alison Weir's work was deemed too long by publishers, and was consequently rejected.
11.
Alison Weir finally became a published author in 1989 with Britain's Royal Families, a compilation of genealogical information about the British Royal Family.
12.
Alison Weir had revised the work eight times over a twenty-two-year period, and decided that it might be "of interest to others".
13.
Alison Weir has written two books on England's Medieval Queens: Queens of Conquest published in 2017 and Queens of the Crusades, published 5 November 2020 by Random House.
14.
Alison Weir wrote historical novels while a teenager, and her novel in the genre of historical fiction, Innocent Traitor, based on the life of Lady Jane Grey, was published in 2006.
15.
When researching Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir realised that it would "be very liberating to write a novel in which I could write what I wanted while keeping to the facts".
16.
Alison Weir decided to make Jane Grey her focus because she "didn't have a very long life and there wasn't a great deal of material".
17.
Traitors of the Tower is a novella written by Alison Weir and published on World Book Day 2010.
18.
Alison Weir published The Marriage Game, a historical novel featuring Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, in June 2014.