Judith Merkle Riley

Judith Merkle Riley (1942-2010) was an American novelist and academic, born in Brunswick, Maine. She held a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. from Harvard, and spent her career as a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, writing historical fiction alongside her academic work. Between 1988 and 1999 she published a sequence of richly researched historical novels blending romance, comedy, and the supernatural, including A Vision of Light and In Pursuit of the Green Lion, which follow a resourceful medieval woman across the Margaret of Ashbury novels, along with The Oracle Glass, set amid the poison scandals of Louis XIV's Paris, and The Master of All Desires. She died of ovarian cancer in 2010.