If Mary Bly were a romance heroine, she might be described as plucky, intelligent and even a bit daring. A professor of Shakespeare at Fordham University by day and a writer of historical romances by night, Bly has straddled two very different worlds since the 1999 release of her first romance, Potent Pleasures.
Known to thousands of romance readers as Eloisa James, Bly has penned seven mass market originals, including the New York Times bestseller Your Wicked Ways (Apr.). Her colleagues at Fordham, however, know nothing of her publishing successes or even her pen name. That will change in January, when Bly comes out of the proverbial closet in a big way.
According to Avon publicist Pamela Spengler-Jaffee, the Wall Street Journal, the Romantic Times and several local newspapers and radio programs will be interviewing Bly, and she has been booked to appear on CNN's American Morning on December 29, the release date of her new book, Much Ado About You. Avon also plans to support Bly's paperback, which will bear the James pseudonym, with a satellite media tour and a 500,000-copy first printing (up from 350,000 for Your Wicked Ways).
The publicity blitz shouldn't surprise those who are familiar with the Bly name—Mary is the daughter of noted poet Robert Bly (author of the bestseller Iron John) and short story writer Carol Bly. But how does a romance writer emerge from such a family? Blame it on Grandma, who passed her Barbara Cartland novels on to her granddaughter. When Bly started reading romances in her teens, her father was "completely bent out of shape" by her reading habits and struck a deal with her: "For so many romances I read, I had to read something so-called 'good,' " she explained.
Bly's academic background makes her an ideal person to speak out against the longstanding stereotype that romance fiction is synonymous with sex and a lack of sophistication; indeed, that's the primary reason she chose to talk about her pseudonym. "I think [the stigma] is allowed to continue more when people like me don't say, 'Look, my degrees are from Harvard, Oxford and Yale, and I'm writing this, and there are people reading me who have backgrounds that are just as intelligent,' " she said.
