A Gemini in every way, Susan Holloway Scott was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in northern New Jersey, in an area rich with colonial American history. She graduated from Northern Valley Regional High School, and after a brief sojourn in art school, she realized her talents lay more with studying other people's paintings than in creating her own. She graduated from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in art history, which combined her three great loves -- history, writing, and art -- into one delightful package..

What's a Girl to Do?

But deciding what to do after that proved more of a challenge. She didn't want to teach, and the job opportunities for art history majors without PhD's were sadly lacking. By default she ended up in college communications, writing press releases and designing admissions publications for a succession of colleges and universities, including Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and Bryn Mawr College. Public relations offered a great training ground for a novelist: it taught Susan how to write with clarity and precision, how to meet tight deadlines, and, most of all, how to deal with obstreperous characters.

Novel Beginnings

And the writing bug had bitten hard. Now married to musician Jay Scott and the mother of two, Susan decided to use her maternity leave after her daughter was born to try writing a book. That first book, a historical romance set during the American Revolution called Steal the Stars, was published in 1992 by Harlequin Books, and Susan's new career was on its way. Under the name Miranda Jarrett, she has written more than thirty bestselling historical romances for Harlequin and for Pocket Books. Many of these books were interlocking family sagas, following the lives and loves of several generations through American history. With over three and half million books in print, Miranda's award-winning books are read in eleven languages and in sixteen foreign countries around the world. She has been a frequent speaker at writers' conferences, and she has served on the executive board of Romance Writers of America.

As Miranda, she is currently working on a new trilogy for Harlequin Historicals, following two aristocratic sisters and their governess as they make the Grand Tour across 18th-century Europe. The first book in the trilogy, The Adventurous Bride, will be published in December, 2006.

Time for a Change

In 2005, Susan decided she wanted to write longer, more complex stories with more characters and actual history than could fit comfortably into a historical romance. She turned to a new time period for her -- the late 17th Century of Charles II’s Restoration -- and wrote Duchess: A Novel of Sarah Churchill. Meticulously researched and filled with the memorable characters that readers expect from Susan's books, Duchess is the fictionalized biography of one the most fascinating and influential women of her time. Look for Duchess this August, 2006, a trade paperback from New American Library.

Looking Ahead

Continuing in the tradition of Duchess, Susan's next fictionalized biography will also be set against the backdrop of the 17th-century English court. Royal Harlot: A Novel of the Countess of Castlemaine and King Charles II is the story of Barbara Villiers, whose wit and sensual beauty seduced a king, and whose cunning made her the most powerful and feared woman in one of the most notorious courts in history. Royal Harlot will be published by New American Library in July, 2007.

Susan lives with her family in a house filled with books outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.