Leah Redmond Chang writes biography and literary non-fiction, with a focus on women’s history. She was trained as a literature scholar, and her books draw on her extensive research in the archives and in rare book libraries. Before turning to writing full time, Leah was a tenured professor of French Literature and Culture at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has also been an Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London.

Leah’s most recent book, Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power (Bloomsbury; Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has been named among the ‘Best Books of 2023’ by The New Yorker and ‘Best Biographies of 2023’ by BookRiot. Young Queens was longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Biography).

Leah lives with her husband and three children in Washington, DC, and spends as much time as possible in London, her favorite city.

If you want to know more about Leah and her process, keep reading…

I spend a lot of time thinking about the relationship between history and literature: what literature tells us about the people who wrote it, how history can read like story. This started years ago at a library with a red-tile roof and long wooden tables, close enough to home for a nine-year-old to walk there by herself. I spent many hours roaming the children’s section. From that neighborhood library, my interest in history took me a lot of places and eventually pointed me toward Renaissance Europe, which I’ve written about for most of my professional life.

Young Queens (Bloomsbury in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US) explores the intertwined stories of three sixteenth-century queens: Catherine de’ Medici, her daughter Elisabeth de Valois, and Catherine’s daughter-in-law Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. I wrote Young Queens to understand what it was like to be a woman endowed with so much power, particularly if you were young. Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary knew each other personally and lived together at the French court for many years before life took them down different paths. Even after they scattered to different kingdoms, their lives continued to intertwine, and they grappled with similar challenges that had everything to do with their gender and their youth. I wanted to understand those challenges and the role young women played in building empires and dynasties. Mostly, I wanted to explore the price that women like Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary paid for that power. 

I am drawn to history because of the moments of connection: when it seems like people of the past are reaching across the centuries to speak to you – and you are hearing what they are saying, and feeling what they are feeling. Sometimes that empathy is long and sustained, like when you read a 500-year-old letter from a mother to her daughter, and it feels like it could be a letter from your own mother. Sometimes, it’s just a brief moment: like when you discover that an exhausted medieval scribe has penned a picture of a wine flask and goblet at the bottom of a manuscript page, announcing his plans now that he’s finished his work. 

Women’s history fascinates me because we often don’t know much about women’s lives. Writing about women from long ago is a little like putting together a puzzle. There will always be gaps but as you assemble the evidence, a picture starts to emerge.

Before Young Queens, I wrote two scholarly books that focused on women’s history. The first, Into Print: The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France, combined my interest in women’s history with another love: manuscripts and early printed books. When writing Into Print, I set out to explore why Renaissance women would risk writing and publishing at a time when women were supposed to be “chaste, silent, and obedient.” I also wanted to know how printers presented these female authors to their audiences. I came away from that book having understood that printers didn’t just publish these authors – they were instrumental to inventing the idea of the woman writer.

My second book, which I wrote with my colleague Katherine Kong, looked closely at Catherine de’ Medici, the Queen Mother of France. In Portraits of the Queen Mother: Polemics, Panegyrics, Letters, we studied and translated dozens of texts to figure out how Catherine presented herself to the world and how she was received. To this day Catherine has a terrible reputation as the murderous and manipulative “Black Queen,” a reputation that began in her lifetime. At the same time, she was beloved by a significant portion of her kingdom. What explained the contradiction? We wanted to know more.

I first discovered the Renaissance in college when I had the opportunity to study an incunabulum, one of the books printed in the first fifty years after the invention of the printing press (before the year 1500). I still remember that book: the beautiful ornaments on the cover; the way the printer had added touches of red ink to draw the reader’s attention to important details; the tiny notes that an unknown reader had left behind in the margin. Ever since, I’ve looked for opportunities to hold rare books, letters, and other documents in my hands. Much of my research comes from these paper trails.

Before I turned to writing full-time, I was a tenured Associate Professor of French Literature and Culture at The George Washington University in Washington D.C. I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I was a Rackham Merit fellow. I studied for my bachelor’s degree at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

I was raised in Los Angeles but migrated east for college before eventually settling in Washington DC. My family and I were fortunate to live in the UK for several years, and I consider London my second home. Before the pandemic I traveled frequently to Europe for research and am happily resuming those trips again.