Diana Birchall

Diana Birchall grew up in New York City, and was educated at Hunter College Elementary School, the High School of Music and Art, and C.C.N.Y, where she studied history and English literature. She has worked in the film industry for many years and is the “book person” story analyst at Warner Bros. Studios, reading novels to see if they would make movies. A lifelong student of Jane Austen, whom she calls her writing teacher, Diana is the author of Mrs. Darcy's Dilemma, a charming and best-selling sequel to Jane Aust­en’s Pride and Prejudice. Originally published by Egerton House Press in England, it is forthcoming in a new reprint edition from Sourcebooks in Spring, 2008. Diana’s comedy pastiche in Defense of Mrs. Elton, based on characters from Jane Austen's Emma, was published by the Jane Austen Society in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. It forms part of the "compleat" Mrs. Elton Trilogy, which is collected in the volume Mrs. Elton in America, published by Egerton House Press.

Diana has also written a scholarly biography of her grandmother, Onoto Watanna, the first Asian American novelist (University of Illinois Press, 2001), which was nominated for an MLA Independent Scholar Award and favorably reviewed in Library Journal, ANQ, Choice, Toronto Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette, and Macleans Magazine.

She has lectured about her books across the country and in Canada and England, has been the subject of a Master’s Tea at Yale University, has addressed the Writers in Oxford Group at Oxford University, and has been keynote speaker at a Romantic Novelists Association conference and a Western History conference at the University of Calgary. Other lectures have been at Columbia University, N.Y.U., the Simone de Beauvoir Institute for Women’s Studies in Montreal, the Association for Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies Association, Western Literature Association, Vancouver Asian American Festival, American Literature Association, the Silver Lake Film Festival, Beyond Baroque, and many others. Diana lives in Santa Monica, California with her husband and son.