Seymour-Jones was born in Towyn, north-west Wales, the daughter of a prominent surgeon.
[1] She studied history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, but left after her first year, under family pressure, to marry the stockbroker Robert Bigland.
Eliot (2001), which she wrote as a visiting fellow at the University of Texas at Austin; and A Dangerous Liaison (2009), about the relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
She wrote for the New Statesman and the Times Higher Education Supplement, and was co-editor of Writers Under Siege: Voices of Freedom from Around the World (2007).
[2] Seymour-Jones met the probation officer and radio playwright Geoffrey Parkinson in 1992; the couple married in 2012.