Margaret Bird

Margaret Bird is the editor of the complete text of The Diary of Mary Hardy 1773-1809, published in four volumes in 2013. She is also the author of the four companion volumes Mary Hardy and her World, published in April 2020. These tell us about the background to Mary Hardy's portrait of rural working life, and paint a wide panorama of local society.

Both sets of volumes gained Highly Commended in the Thirsk Prize for the Best Book in British or Irish Rural History 2021. Two volumes of Mary Hardy and her World were shortlisted, in separate categories, for the East Anglian Book Awards 2020.

Margaret's latest work, published by the Holt Society in April 2023, was based principally on her Mary Hardy researches. The booklet Georgian Holt at Work and Play is a study of the men, women and children of the local market town valued by the Hardy family for the commercial and leisure opportunities it provided.

Margaret worked on the massive Mary Hardy project without a break from 1988 to 2023. Until her books were published little was known about the prolific 18th-century diarist who at times gives unique coverage of events around her.

Margaret was an honorary research fellow in the History department of Royal Holloway, University of London 2006–21. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Born in central London in 1946, she read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford and gained her master's at Royal Holloway. She and her husband Tony have lived in Kingston upon Thames since 1970.

Above all Margaret likes to communicate her huge enthusiasm for history: in articles, talks, seminars and also in the way she presents her findings on the page. She writes for the general reader as well as the researcher and other historians. Almost every page has a picture, with a long caption. Editorial notes on the page itself – and not in endnotes – are essential elements of her style, together with solid indexes in the hardback volumes. The indexes serve as research aids.

Margaret has loved history all her life. Boating on the Norfolk Broads with her family has been another lifelong passion – in the very part of the country where Mary Hardy wrote her diary.

In March 2026 Burnham Press, the firm which had published all eleven of Margaret's Mary Hardy titles in 2013 and 2020, closed for business as the partners were retiring.