Glynis Ridley was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, and now lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is a professor of English at the University of Louisville. She is a graduate of the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, at both of which she specialized in studying the eighteenth century. Her book, Clara's Grand Tour. Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Atlantic Books, London: 2004) won the Institute of Historical Research Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award and the Duff Cooper Prize in 2004. Her husband, John Patrick Greene, is a professor of French, and it was as they were both traveling to a conference in Australia, in 2001, that he asked her if she knew anything about Jeanne Baret - the first woman to circumnavigate the globe on an expedition that set out in 1766. Only one fact seemed to be known about Baret - that she worked as a botanist on board ship. The Discovery of Jeanne Baret is the story of this extraordinary woman who disguised herself as a man to travel the world in pursuit of what she loved.