Mary Bly, writing under the pen name Eloisa James, is a tenured Shakespeare professor at Fordham University who also writes best-selling Regency and Georgian romance novels. Her novels are published in 30 countries and have sold approximately 7 million copies worldwide. She also wrote a bestselling memoir about the year her family spent in France, Paris in Love.

Among other things, Mary and Carter discuss how Mary’s work in academia influenced her to write under a different name, breaking into the romance genre after studying Shakespeare, and how reader expectations of romance characters have changed. At the end of their conversation, they make up a hilarious story using a line from Kristen Perrin’s How to Solve Your Own Murder.