Paula Byrne, born into a large working-class family in Birkenhead in 1967, is a British author and biographer most famous for her bestsellers Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson and Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. Her debut book was the highly-acclaimed study of Jane Austen, Jane Austen and the Theatre, which was published in 2002 by Hambledon and reissued in paperback in 2007 by Continuum. Byrne has a PhD from the University of Liverpool. Before becoming an author, she taught in a grammar school and a further education college. She has been an honorary research fellow at Liverpool University and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Warwick.
In 2005 her biography Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson was featured on the Richard & Judy Book Club on Channel 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. It has to do with Lord Beauchamp William, 7th Earl of Beauchamp, who was the father of Waugh's friend Hugh Lygon. Its stated thesis is "that the exiled Lord Marchmain [a character in Brideshead Revisited] was a version of Boom [Lord Beauchamp] and Lady Marchmain of the Countess Beauchamp, that the dissolute Sebastian Flyte was Hugh and other Lygon siblings matched other roles." The book, which Byrne describes in the preface as a "partial life," identifies other real-life bases for events and characters in Waugh's novel, though Byrne argues carefully against simple one-to-one correspondences, suggesting instead that Waugh combined people, places and events into composite inventions, subtle transmutations of life into fiction. An illustrated extract appeared in the April 2010 issue of Vanity Fair in advance of American publication.
In autumn 2010 her publisher HarperCollins announced that she has been commissioned to write a major new biography of Jane Austen.
Byrne is married to Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare scholar and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. They have three young children.