The Honourable Jane Ridley FRSL was born on 15 May 1953 and is an English historian, biographer, author and broadcaster, and Professor of Modern History at the University of Buckingham.
10 Facts About Jane Ridley
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Jane Ridley's father married Clayre Campbell, a daughter of Alistair, 4th Baron Stratheden and Campbell.
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Jane Ridley's great-grandmother Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton, who dismayed her parents by marrying the architect Edwin Lutyens, was a daughter of the Earl of Lytton, Viceroy of India in the 1870s.
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Jane Ridley's parents were the novelists Edward and Rosina Bulwer Lytton.
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Jane Ridley was educated at Cranborne Chase School, an independent boarding school for girls, since closed, then occupying New Wardour Castle, near the village of Tisbury in Wiltshire, and later at St Hugh's College, Oxford, as an Exhibitioner in History.
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Jane Ridley took a first class honours degree in 1974, then was a research student at Nuffield College until 1978, graduating D Phil.
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In 1979, Jane Ridley was appointed a lecturer in history at the University of Buckingham, where she was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1994, to Reader in 2002, to Senior Tutor responsible for student discipline the next year, and finally to Professor in 2007.
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In 2008, Jane Ridley was given a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on her biography of King Edward VII, and this was finally published as Bertie: A Life of Edward VII in 2012.
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In 1986, Jane Ridley married Stephen Francis Thomas, a writer, the younger son of Sir William Cooper Thomas, by his marriage to Freida Dunbar Whyte.
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Jane Ridley is a member of the committee of the London Library and lives in Dorset Square, Marylebone.