Elizabeth Byrd (1912–1989)

Elizabeth Byrd was the pen name of Sarah Elizabeth Evelyn Byrd, born in St. Louis, Missouri. When she was a baby, her family moved to New York City. In 1932–1933, she attended writing courses at New York University. Between 1939 and 1945, she was a news writer for CBS Radio (then the Columbia Broadcasting System). In 1942-1943, she became a script writer and on-air talent for "What's News" on radio station WMCA.

In 1944, Byrd left radio and began a new career as an associate editor for New York literary agencies. She then established her own literary agency, Betty Byrd Associates, which was in business from 1951 to 1953. In 1952, she became a critic for the A.L. Fierst Literary Agency and was the editor for three years of Your Romance, a "confession" magazine. She wrote jacket copy for the publishing house Julian Messner from 1952 to 1960.
She also contributed articles to various periodicals, including Venture, McCall's, Reader's Digest, and Scottish Field. At some point during her early career in New York City, she married her first husband, Don Phares.
Eventually she was able to become a full-time novelist. Her most successful work was also her debut, Immortal Queen: A Novel of Mary Queen of Scots (1956). Byrd was fascinated by Mary Stuart from childhood, collected biographies on her life, and wrote a play about her at age 12. She traveled to Scotland in 1953 to research Mary's life further. Immortal Queen was published when Byrd was 43 years old. It became a bestseller and was translated into seven languages. Byrd moved permanently to Scotland around 1966 and lived there for the next 10 years, publishing nine more works, six of them Europe-based historical fiction. She also wrote The Ghosts in My Life (1968) and A Strange and Seeing Time (1971), in which she described paranormal occurrences that she and her second husband Barrie Gaunt experienced while living in Leith Hall, Aberdeenshire. In 1975, she wrote I'll Get By: An Autobiographical Novel, for which she won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. She published a sequel, It Had to Be You, in 1982.

When Byrd returned to the USA in 1976, she lived in to Tucson, Arizona, where her other family members had previously settled. However, she missed Scotland and went back there after five years.