was born in New York City in 1946; she attended New York City Public Schools, and graduated from Queens College with a B.A. in English, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa. She also spent a year in a program of study abroad at Leeds University which was partly paid for by a Chancellor's Scholarship. She received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate School, of the City University of New York. She majored in 18th century literature, French and English, and minored in the Renaissance. Her advisor was Robert Adams Day, and her dissertation title is Richardson, Romance, and Reverie. It is a study of romance traditions in the novel from its beginnings in Chretien de Troyes through Richardson and into the 20th century, with particular attention paid to the impact of Clarissa and French and French enlightenment aesthetic thought on the novel.

For her publications and other professional details, see her Resume.

Finally, Ellen Moody has been teaching as an adjunct lecturer in various English Departments at senior colleges on the East Coast for more than twenty years. She has been employed by George Mason University for thirteen years; during the first two, and for three years before this time, she taught at The American University in Washington, D.C.. During her first two years at The American University, she also taught advanced literature courses for the Northern Regional Center of the University of Virginia. For some four years before this in the earlier 1970's she taught as an adjunct lecturer and graduate fellow at both Brooklyn and Queens College of the City University of New York. She was able to cease teaching in the later 1970's because she won a couple of awards, including an American University of Women scholarship. She and Jim Moody have been married more than thirty years, and they have two daughters, Laura, born 1978, and Isabel, born 1984.