Roberta Gellis

Roberta Gellis was an American author known primarily for historical romance and historical fiction set in medieval and Renaissance Europe, praised across her career for the depth of her period research. Late in her career she moved into historical fantasy through a collaboration with Mercedes Lackey, co-writing the Doubled Edge series, which reimagines Elizabethan England as a world where the fae realm of Underhill exists alongside the human one, and where historical figures — including a young Elizabeth I — have hidden fae allies shaping the political and magical stakes of the era. Where Lackey's SERRAted Edge books transplant elves into modern car culture, Doubled Edge went the opposite direction, folding elves into richly researched real history, and the series drew directly on Gellis's decades of expertise in the period's politics, court life, and social detail to ground its fantasy elements in convincing historical texture. Gellis published extensively across historical romance and fantasy genres over several decades, building a reputation for combining meticulous period accuracy with genre storytelling, and the Doubled Edge collaboration with Lackey represented a late-career return to fantasy after a body of work largely centered on straightforward historical fiction and romance.