Lisa Kleypas

Lisa Kleypas, born November 5, 1964, in Temple, Texas, is an American author of historical and contemporary romance novels. Before her literary career took hold, she was named Miss Massachusetts 1985 and competed in the Miss America 1986 pageant in Atlantic City. Her family moved to Massachusetts when she was three, and she grew up between Watertown, Carlisle, Concord, and Lexington. That New England background, along with early encouragement at home, helped set the course for a writing life.

Kleypas began writing at sixteen during a summer camp at Wellesley College. Her parents, Linda and Lloyd Kleypas, encouraged the interest and sent her to a writers’ conference in Bretton Woods. For the next five years she wrote a new work every summer, though she did not consider any of them publishable. A course on the Georgian era at Boston College drew her toward romance novels set during the English Regency. In 1986, after participating in Miss America, she focused on her studies and graduated in political science from Wellesley College three months after selling her first novel to a publishing house.

She became best known for historical romance, while also writing contemporary romance. In early 2006, she announced a brief move away from historical romances into contemporary romance; her debut contemporary novel, Sugar Daddy, reached the New York Times bestsellers list. Her work also includes Dreaming of You, the Ravenels series, Devil in Spring, and Devil in Disguise, published in 2021. In 2026, she announced Queen of Lombard Street, scheduled for release on October 20, 2026, as her first new novel since Devil in Disguise.

Kleypas’s reading and life experience shaped the way she built characters. Her inspirations include Wuthering Heights, E. M. Forster, Laura Kinsale, Loretta Chase, and Kathleen Woodiwiss, whose The Flame and the Flower introduced her to the romance genre. She has also said that reading biographies enriches her as a writer. Her time in beauty pageants affected her approach to heroines: she chose not to write women who were physically perfect and completely self-confident. Her stories often feature misfits and outsiders, including non-aristocratic heroes and heroines who feel out of place, who are eventually valued for who they are.

A flood in October 1998 also clarified what romance meant to her. Her Texas home flooded, and her family lost everything except the clothes they were wearing. Colleagues sent clothes and books. When Kleypas and her mother, whose home had also flooded, went to buy necessities, each separately chose a romance novel as a way to escape the stress. For Kleypas, that moment confirmed her choice to write romance rather than more literary work. Over time, she also revised her views on desire and consent, saying that earlier ideas about forceful passion gave way to an interest in two intelligent, strong people challenging and discovering each other. Her later rules included no physical abuse between hero and heroine, strict limits on verbal abuse, and dialogue before love scenes in which the hero asks for consent.

Kleypas’s books remain appealing because they join emotional intensity with clear ideas about respect, growth, and being seen. As her career progressed, she brought more history into her historical romances; for the Ravenels series, she drew on Victorian women such as inventor Elizabeth Magie and doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to create female protagonists seeking professional fulfillment outside marriage. She writes contemporary novels from a first-person perspective, and she lives in California with her husband, entrepreneur Gregory Ellis, and their two children.