Wendy Moore to Pen Novel Based on Real Life Eliza Doolittle

Wendy Moore, author of the popular novel "Wedlock," will pen a novel based on real life Eliza Doolittle, Sabrina Sidney, the basis for the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion and the hit Lerner and Lowe musical, My Fair Lady. The novel, entitled "How to Create the Perfect Wife," is currently in publication negotiations.

Sidney was an orphan who was removed from poverty and groomed into the ideal wife in 1769. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Moore said, "I have spent about a year researching the book so far. There is still a lot of work to do, but I had quite a eureka moment when I went to the foundling hospital in Shrewsbury and managed to track Sabrina down."

"The beginning of the book is about the foundling hospital and I have recreated Sabrina's childhood. She was sent out to a nanny first and then at two she went to the foundling hospital in London and finally on to Shrewsbury."

To read the full article from The Guardian, click here.

Having worked as a journalist and freelance writer for more than 25 years, Moore began writing her first book, The Knife Man in 2003. Her second book, Wedlock, the true story of Mary Eleanor Bowes, was published in 2009.

Previously Moore worked as a journalist and freelance writer with a career spanning more than 25 years. She trained in journalism straight from secondary school on the standard one-year NCTJ journalism course at Harlow technical college and began my first newspaper job at the age of 19 in Buckinghamshire before moving to the Hampstead and Highgate Express in London in 1980.

Initially working as a crime reporter, tracking stories such as the Dennis Nielsen murders, Moore was switched to reporting health issues. Soon fascinated by medical topics, and particularly the history of medicine, she devoted the rest of my career to writing about health matters. She spent several years as a reporter and later news editor on the Health Service Journal, the main weekly magazine for the NHS, before leaving to work freelance in 1991. As a freelance journalist, Moore has written for many national newspapers, including The Times, The Guardian, The Observer and the Sunday Telegraph as well as for professional magazines such as the British Medical Journal and has won several awards for my journalism.

The Knife Man won the Medical Journalists' Association Consumer Book Award in 2005 and was highly commended in the British Medical Association's Medical Book Competition the same year. In 2007, the book was short-listed for the biennial Marsh Biography Award and has been highly acclaimed in reviews. Book Festival in Glasgow, February 2005; the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival in June 2005; and the Edinburgh Book Festival in August 2005, as well as giving numerous presentations elsewhere.

Her second book, a biography of Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore, is on sale now, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK and by Crown in the US. Moore lives in south east London with her husband Peter, also a journalist, and two children, Sam (15) and Susannah (12).

For more information, visit www.wendymoore.org.

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