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Julia Markus is a biographer, novelist and educator whose career spans over four decades. She received her BA and MA in Comparative Literature under the direction of Angelo Bertocci at Boston University and her PhD at the University of Maryland under the direction of William S. Peterson.
Her novels include Uncle (1978) the first novel from an established American press with a closeted homosexual as a main character. It won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award. It was followed by the well-reviewed American Rose (1981), Friends Along the Way (1983) and A Change of Luck (1990).
During a long stay in Italy, she became interested in the Anglo-American Community of expatriate artists living in Rome and Florence in the 19th century. After receiving her PhD, she wrote her first biography, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (1995).
The poets’ secret marriage in London and subsequent life in Florence is explored. The myth of Elizabeth Barrett’s father opposing her marriage to Robert Browning because of his incestuous desire for his oldest daughter –the premise of a once popular play “The Barretts of Wimpole Street”– is debunked. Moulton Barrett forbade all of his children–3 daughters and 6 sons from marrying because of his racial guilt. The Barretts had been affluent slave owners in Jamaica, and he and his children were of mixed blood. In fact Elizabeth was the first Barrett born in England, not Jamaica, in over 200 years. Out of guilt for his slave-holding heritage, her strict father attempted to end his line. He never forgave Elizabeth for marrying and giving birth to a son.
Across an Untried Sea (2000) centers on the American female artists living and working in Rome such as actor Charlotte Cushman, the sculptors Emma Stebbins, Harriet Hosmer and others who were women who loved women and found in nineteenth century Florence and Rome the ability to live, to love, and to dress freely.
J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian (2005) brings to the fore the life of a brilliant historian, who was expelled from Oxford for free thinking, and whose relationship with Thomas Carlyle set the path for his later, conservative development.
Lady Byron and Her Daughters (2015), short listed for the prestigious Emma Dangerfield Prize, explores Annabella Milbank’s brutal marriage to poet Lord Byron. After a painful legal separation from the man she loved but knew was hell-bent on destroying her, she did much for the education of the working class in England. She also took Byron’s daughter Allegra by his half sister under her wing to sad results. Her own daughter by Lord Byron was Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program and is celebrated today.
Markus has also written on visual artists such as Andy Warhol and Romare Bearden for the Smithsonian Magazine. And for many years she taught at Hofstra University where she directed the Creative Writing Program. She is currently at work on a new biography, “‘That Vulgar Woman,’ Fanny Trollope and All Her Children.”
For more information consult her website: juliamarkuswrites.com