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This biographical article is written like a résumé. Please help improve it by revising it to be neutral and encyclopedic. (January 2011)
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Paula Byrne (Lady Bate), born in 1967, is a British author and biographer who wrote Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson and Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. Her debut book was the study of Jane Austen, Jane Austen and the Theatre, which was published in 2002 by Hambledon and later reissued by Bloomsbury. Byrne has a PhD from the University of Liverpool.
In 2005 her biography Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson was featured on the Richard & Judy Book ClubonChannel 4, propelling it into the Sunday Times bestseller list.
Her book Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead was published by HarperPress in the UK in August 2009 and HarperCollins New York in the USA in April 2010. An excerpt was published in the Sunday Times of August 9 under the headline Sex scandal behind Brideshead Revisited. An illustrated extract appeared in the April 2010 issue of Vanity Fair in advance of American publication.
In a television programme broadcast on BBC2 on Boxing Day 2011 she explored the possibility that a Regency graphite on vellum drawing, labelled on the verso 'Miss Jane Austin', might be an authentic portrait of Jane Austen. The film presented forensic and art historical evidence that the work was authentic to the period, not a forgery, but the case for its being Austen was fiercely debated, both in the programme and subsequently in the Times Literary Supplement. Byrne lent the drawing to Jane Austen's House Museum in Chawton, where it was exhibited from summer 2012.
In January 2013, coinciding with the bicentenary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice, Byrne published a new biography called The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Featured as BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, it approaches the subject's life by means of an array of key objects, including her portable writing desk and the topaz cross given to her by her brother.
In 2014, she published a biography of Dido Elizabeth Belle, which was a commission to coincide with the general release of the motion picture Belle (2013 film). Since few facts are known about Dido, the book set her life in the broader context of women and slavery in the late eighteenth century.
Byrne is married to Sir Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare scholar and ProvostofWorcester College, Oxford.
She has also recently become embroiled in a scandalous affair with student lothario Edward Mallett.
