Lucasta Miller

Dr Lucasta Miller is a critic and life-writer, specialising in nineteenth-century literary history. Her first book, The Brontë Myth (Cape, 2001; Knopf, 2003), was a groundbreaking study of the Brontë sisters’ afterlives. L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Mysterious Death of the ‘Female Byron’ (Cape and Knopf, 2019) unearthed the tangled story of the forgotten poet Letitia Landon. A former visiting scholar at Wolfson College Oxford, Miller is currently honorary research fellow in the Department of English at UCL. She has been keen to develop a voice in which to communicate scholarly research to the general reader.

In her parallel life as a journalist, she has been a prolific book reviewer over the years, focusing on biography, cultural history and contemporary fiction. While on contract to the Guardian in the 2000s, she specialised in writing long-form profiles of cultural figures, from the philosopher Julia Kristeva to the conductor Antonio Pappano to the scholar Stephen Greenblatt. She was a judge on the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

Lucasta Miller began her career as an editor on the books pages of the Independent in the 1990s. In 2010, she helped launch Notting Hill Editions, a short book imprint devoted to the nonfiction essay form. As editorial director, she worked with such writers as the novelist Margaret Drabble and the scientist Susan Greenfield.

Since 2017, she has volunteered with the charity Women for Refugee Women, where she has developed her teaching skills by running a creative writing class for asylum-seekers.