She wrote an early appreciation of
Monique Wittig's second novel,
Les Guérillères, in
The New York Times Book Review. The book was published in France in the wake of
the 1968 upheavals, but was not available to English readers until the 1971 translation. Beauman's first work of non-fiction was ''The Royal Shakespeare Company's Centenary Production of Henry V'' (
Pergamon Press, 1976), a study of the
RSC's
1975 staging. In 1982, to coincide with the opening of the
Barbican Theatre in London, the
Oxford University Press published her study of
The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (), chronicling the turbulent history of what was to become the RSC from its first founding as a small seasonal theatre in
Stratford upon Avon in 1879. She then began to write fiction, initially writing a series of nine romance novels for
Mills & Boon under the pseudonym Vanessa James. She received a record-breaking advance for her first novel,
Destiny, which became an international best-seller. Her subsequent novels include
Dark Angel, in which a country-house and a family is almost destroyed by the orphan child it has taken in; ''Rebecca's Tale
and The Landscape of Love'', a novel with
multiple narrators that examines the post-1960's lives of three very different and antagonistic sisters. Her novel
The Visitors (2014) concerns the discovery of
Tutankhamun's tomb in the
Valley of the Kings in 1922, the subterfuge that attended it, and the political turmoil it caused. ==Personal life==