Grace Tiffany

Grace Tiffany is an American author and Shakespeare scholar. Her new novel, THE OWL WAS A BAKER'S DAUGHTER (Harper, 2025) follows the fortunes of a woman of the Shakespeare family, a midwife and apothecary, as she navigates battle-torn England during its mid-seventeenth-century civil war. An earlier novel, GUNPOWDER PERCY (Bagwyn, 2016) is based on the real story of the doomed Catholic zealots who plotted to blow up the English House of Lords in 1605. Her prior novel PAINT (Bagwyn, 2013) is based on the life of Emilia Lanier, a scandalous seventeenth-century poet thought by some to have been the mysterious Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets. PAINT is the third of a network of novels in which Tiffany explores Shakespeare's fraught relations with women, both at home and in the busy London theater world. The first of this group, MY FATHER HAD A DAUGHTER (Berkley, 2003), won Booksense 76 listing from the independent booksellers of America. Tiffany's sole novel for teenagers, ARIEL, appeared on the 2006 American Library Association list of best novels for young adults. She has also written two nonfiction books about English Renaissance culture.