By profession I am a freelance archivist, and most of my writing has come about from my work.  My first book was published at the suggestion of a dealer; The Business of Watercolour, was a catalogue of the archives of the Royal Watercolour Society. In 1998 I wrote The Enchanted River, a bicentennial history of the RWS.  This led to a lot of writing about art and artists, including obituaries by the score.  Other writings include A Guide to the Archives of the Royal Entomologists and a couple of monographs on artists.  On the death of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in 2011 I went to Greece to organise his archive; out of this came Joan, the Remarkable Life of Joan Leigh Fermor (Leigh Fermor’s wife) in 2017.  My current subject is Long Crichel House in Dorset, a literary salon in the post-war years.

Ophelia is the author of a critically acclaimed life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (1660-1744) titled THE FAVOURITE (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002 and rev. ed. by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018). This was followed by a group biography of a gentlemen’s club from the early 1700s, chosen as an FT History Book of the Year, titled THE KIT-CAT CLUB (HarperCollins, 2008). She currently directs the University of Buckingham’s London-based postgraduate Programme in Biography and periodically reviews biographies for literary, national and academic publications. For further details, see www.opheliafield.com.