Miranda Malins

Miranda Malins is a British historian and historical novelist specialising in Oliver Cromwell, his family and the politics of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. She studied at the University of Cambridge, completing a PhD in 2010, and has served for many years as a trustee of the Cromwell Association. Alongside her fiction she writes historical articles and reviews for publications including History Today, BBC History and Aspects of History, and co-hosts the seventeenth-century history podcast 1666 And All That. Her academic background gives her novels a particularly strong grounding in the political and domestic world surrounding the Cromwell family.

Her first novel, The Puritan Princess (2020), is centred on Frances Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell’s youngest daughter, during the Protectorate, when her father’s extraordinary rise from country gentleman to Lord Protector places the family at the centre of English political power. The novel explores courtship, dynastic marriage, assassination threats and the debate over whether Cromwell should accept the crown. The Rebel Daughter (2022) acts as a prequel and follows Frances’s elder sister Bridget Cromwell during the English Civil War, beginning in 1643 as Oliver Cromwell’s military career gathers momentum. Both novels use members of the real Cromwell family as central characters and bring women’s experiences into a period more commonly told through battles and high politics, while necessarily reconstructing private conversations, relationships and motives that the surviving historical record does not preserve.