Sophie Read

Sophie grew up mostly in Colchester, where she was educated at the local girls' grammar school. She read English at Queens' College, Cambridge, spending three very contented years pursuing - not always that systematically - a rich and varied course of reading. After her BA she took a couple of years out to work in publishing, but eventually decided it must be more fun to write books than persuade people to buy them and returned to Queens' to research a doctoral thesis on seventeenth-century poets and their theological beliefs. When Sophie contributed to Darkness Visible, she was teaching English at Christ's College, where she still works as a Fellow and University Lecturer in English. She sees it as her happy duty to persuade as many people as possible to read Paradise Lost: most of them thank her in the end.