Her essay on BBC drama is an outgrowth of that interest. She took her undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and earned her Ph.D. degree at Yale, where she wrote her dissertation on Robert Browning’s “unreadable epic, Sordello.” After abandoning “the first principle of academic writing—if it’s intelligible, it can’t be intelligent,” she has written on a variety of subjects, including forensic chemistry and medicine.