Margaret Anne Doody was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. She graduated at Dalhousie University in English and later obtained a Doctorate at Oxford University. She has taught and lectured English at several universities. She was Director of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. She is now John and Barbary Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her novels feature the famous philosopher Aristotle as an amateur sleuth in ancient Greece. In total 12 books were published but most of them only in Italian.