She is a tenured Shakespeare professor at Fordham University who also writes best-selling Regency and Georgian romance novels under her pen name.
She was the inspiration for her mother's essay "The Maternity Wing, Madison, Minnesota", which was published in the anthology Imagining Home: Writing From the Midwest.
Throughout her childhood, she wrote and produced plays, using her siblings as the cast, and charging admission to any adults in the household (poets came often, visiting her father).
[citation needed] She is a tenured professor lecturing on William Shakespeare at Fordham University in New York City.
[2] Two publishers bid for that novel, Potent Pleasures,[10] netting Bly an advance that paid off her student loans in full.
Following the publication of those three novels, she bought out the remainder of her contract and moved to Avon, where her books are now published in mass market paperback format.
[15] As she spends much of her day teaching about or reading early British English, she feels that the language choices she makes in her novels are more authentic.
[19] For several years Bly's second career remained a secret, and she disguised herself by wearing contacts instead of her normal glasses when she attended functions as Eloisa James.
[12] At a February 16, 2005, faculty meeting, Bly outed herself to her colleagues, revealing her alter ego and offering copies of her novels to her fellow professors.
Carol Bly also supported her daughter, contributing a "nifty crossword puzzle" to the Eloisa James website.
[23] The family lives primarily in New York[24] but spends summers in Tuscany visiting Alessandro's mother and sister.