It was as a small girl in Lincolnshire that Emily Sellwood first saw the boy Alfred Tennyson. Nearly thirty years later, in the year he became Poet Laureate, they married. What kept them apart and what eventually brought them together has never before been fully explored.

This major biography radically alters the picture of the poet's relationship with his wife, establishing in detail the person Emily Tennyson was. It is the story of a remarkable family as well as a remarkable woman, bringing into the foreground a neglected and often misunderstood character a century after her death.

'Meeting Emily Tennyson in the pages of Thwaite's enthralling book is pure delight.' "Sunday Express"

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""'A finely and deeply researched work, and clearly a labour of love ...She tells an ever absorbing story, and throws much light on that fascinating social area in which high art and worldly power meet.' "The Times"

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""'This fat and well-documented book will quickly establish its place in bibliographies of essential Tennyson background.' "Literary Review"

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'A magnificent, surprising biography.' Lynne Truss, "Mail on Sunday"

The two quiet lives are Dorothy Osborne, writer of the famous love letters to William Temple, and Thomas Gray, poet, Cambridge don and friend of Horace Walpole. They lived a century apart, but as David Cecil shows, were temperamentally akin. Both were reserved, introspective and prone to melancholy: both appeared awkward and difficult save to the few to whom they opened their hearts: both commanded a fund of humour and imagination and possessed an instinctive feeling for style: and both enjoyed an inner life which was vivid, strong and exciting. David Cecil's subtle and sympathetic study of two remarkable natures is a sustained piece of exquisite scholarship which reads as engagingly now as it did when first published in 1948.

Unfinished Adventure, published in 1933, is Evelyn Sharp's autobiography. It is a remarkable book recounting a remarkable life. Born in 1869, Evelyn Sharp was the sister of the folk song and dance expert, Cecil Sharp. A journalist, writer, pacifist and suffragist, Evelyn Sharp writes vividly about all aspects of her life: her school-days, Paris in 1890 , the Yellow Book, the Manchester Guardian, her conversion to Suffragism, her imprisonment in Holloway, her war work, her relief work in Germany and Russia in the nineteen-twenties, and finally, in her own words, 'The Greatest of All Adventures': the day she completed this book she married the campaigning writer and journalist, H. W. Nevinson. A. S. Byatt has described Evelyn Sharp as 'perspicacious, witty and a very good writer.' Evelyn Sharp and her autobiography deserve to be better known Faber Finds is very pleased to be reissuing An Unfinished Adventure at the same time as the Manchester University Press publish Angela John's biography, Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955

Max Beerbohm is one of those figures, like Dr Johnson and Oscar Wilde, as well known as a personality as he is an artist. He was a superb parodist and cartoonist, and he was the leading wit and dandy of the Edwardian age. His very first book was boldly entitled The Works of Max Beerbohm (a collection of seven essays). He wrote mainly in miniature forms but his most famous work is his only novel Zuleika Dobson, a comic fantasy about undergraduate life at Oxford in the 1890s. David Cecil was appointed by Max Beerbohm to be his biographer. The choice could not have been more apt. Granted access to his private papers, David Cecil provides an intimate portrait of an odd, brilliant and most lovable human being, who was also a deeper and more considerable character than his facade betrayed. Besides being a picture of a man, this book is the picture of an age. In it the literary, theatrical and fashionable worlds of the 1890s and of Edward VII's reign appear in vivid detail as seen through the amused but penetrating eyes of Max: he knew everyone worth knowing in that era and had something to say about each of them. 'He has assembled all the available facts in a way to leave us grateful.' Evelyn Waugh, Sunday Times 'Here, exhibiting a small, delightful talent, is a large delightful book.' J. I. M. Stewart, Listener

First published in 1929, The Stricken Deer was the winner of that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize and also the Hawthornden Prize: it was David Cecil's first book. For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil's biography doesn't celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper's own words, 'the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.' Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression. His personal tragedy however enriched English literature: the fear of madness made him turn to writing poetry as a form of mental discipline, and isolation for the great world and from his own kind helped him to become the most enchanting of letter-writers. 'This is a sympathetic and vivid biography; it is subtle with a kind of gentle acuteness and vivid without literary ostentation. It is the work of a biographer with a clear head and a clever heart ... the rarest of all merits is the sensitive fairness of the of the biographer's estimate of character and situation throughout.' Desmond MacCarthy, Sunday Times

First published in 1994, Paul Binding's portrait of Eudora Welty is being reissued to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her birth. Eudora Welty was a Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of numerous literary friendships and awards. She was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth-century. Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. Eudora Welty was brought up in the harsh American South when it was bedevilled both by the Depression and racial discrimination. Her acclaimed novels and short stories however are imbued with compassion and optimism, while also revealing her extraordinary gift for inhabiting the inner world of her characters. Paul Binding knew Eudora Welty, and in this book he draws on the many conversations he had with both her and her friends and fellow writers. The Still Moment presents a critical portrait of a remarkable mind and a profoundly humanist writer.

The extraordinary character of Ben Jonson has only recently been brought into the light. Critics traditionally exalted Shakespeare, at Jonson's expense. In this biography, first published in 1986, the author presents a full and accurate account of Jonson's life in modern times. Rosalind Miles follows Jonson from his obscure beginnings to his burial in Westminster Abbey, as the first Poet Laureate, in 1637. Her Jonson is vivid and vigorous, equally alive in his life and in his work. This title will be of interest to students of history, English literature and Renaissance drama.

The question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays has been the subject of furious debate among scholars for over 150 years. Everything known about the facts of William Shakespeare's life seems incompatible with the extraordinary genius of his writing. How could a man who left school at the age of 13, and apparently never travelled abroad have authored the incomparable Sonnets or so intricately described Renaissance Venice? Shakespeare 'candidates' abound, among them Sir Francis Bacon, The Earl of Oxford, even Queen Elizabeth I herself, but none have stood up to serious scrutiny. Until now.... This remarkable, intriguing, and provocative book offers a completely plausible new candidate; Sir Henry Neville.

Rudyard Kipling has been described as 'one of the few complete originals in English literature'. In his last work, Something of Myself, he reflects on his life and the basis of his art. Yet paradoxically this ostensibly autobiographical work (as an early critic pointed out) actually discloses very little of himself. Thomas Pinney's revealing edition now uncovers the extraordinary extent to which Kipling's account of his life fails to match the biographical facts, in a series of selections, omissions and distortions. Illustrated with Kipling's own satirical drawings from the manuscripts, and brought together with his other autobiographical writings (some previously unpublished), this fascinating book sheds new light on the intriguing relationship between Kipling's life and work.

At the end of the 1970s, Manchester seemed to be sliding into the dustbin of history. Today the city is an international destination for culture and sport, and one of the fastest-growing urban regions in Europe. This book offers a first-hand account of what happened in between. Arriving in Manchester as a wide-eyed student in 1979, Andy Spinoza went on to establish the arts magazine City Life before working for the Manchester Evening News and creating his own PR firm. In a forty-year career he has encountered a who's who of Manchester personalities, from cultural icons such as Tony Wilson to Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and influential council leaders Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein. His remarkable account traces Manchester's gradual emergence from its post-industrial malaise, centring on the legendary nightclub the Hacienda and the cultural renaissance it inspired. Manchester unspun begins in the gloom of a city still bearing the scars of the Second World War and ends among the shiny towers of an aspiring twenty-first-century metropolis. It is an insider's tale of deals done, government and corporate decision-making, nightclubs, music and entrepreneurs. -- .

The Wild Garden is both an autobiographical essay on the creative process and a remarkable personal account of the circumstances surrounding the nervous crisis that impelled Angus Wilson to become a writer at the age of thirty-six. Examining specific incidents, characters, places and recurring symbols in his life and work, notably the wild garden itself, Wilson analyses the links between his own life crisis and the theme of liberation by self-realization that was to be central to all his novels. 'The Wild Garden is, quite simply, one of the finest accounts of the creative process by a recent writer that I know. Here Angus Wilson looks at the springs of writing in a way that all writers can recognize, and all readers appreciate as a way into the brilliant, discovering imagination that lay behind his major novels.' Malcolm Bradbury

In Humphrey Carpenter's own words, 'This is the story of the longest-ever literary party, which went on in Montparnasse, on the Left Bank, throughout the 1920s.'

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""'This book', to continue to quote Carpenter himself, 'is chiefly a collage of Left-Bank expatriate life as it was experienced by the Hemingway generation - "The Lost Generation," as Gertrude Stein named it in a famous remark to Hemingway.'

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""There are brief portraits of Gertrude Stein, Natalie Clifford Barney and Sylvia Beach, who moved to Paris before the First World War and provided vital introductions for the exiles of the 1920s. The main narrative, however, concerns the years 1921 to 1928 because these saw the arrival and departure of Hemingway and most of his Paris associates.

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""'He is a compelling guide, catching the kind of idiosyncratic detail or incident that holds the readers' attention and maintains a cracking pace. Anyone wanting an introduction to the constellation of talent that made the Left Bank in Paris during the Twenties a second Greenwich Village would find this a useful and inspiring book.' "Times Educational Supplement "

First published in 1968. Richard Hengist Horne, virtually unknown today, was one of the more extraordinary figures of the nineteenth century literary scene. The author of an epic poem Orion was acclaimed a work of genius by almost every English critic. His voluminous literary output is for the most part forgotten, but his life and character, his widely romantic aspirations to be a Man of Genius, provide a fascinating tragi-comic study. As a background study to the literature and society of the time, Ann Blainey's book is packed with interest and anecdote, and as a study of a remarkable man it is consistently entertaining.

From the renowned artist and author Patti Smith, a rare and generous look into the creative process A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic--its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture's beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections. Patti Smith first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession--a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus's house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil's grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano's novels. Whether writing in a caf or a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book on writing. The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

Dennis Potter's death in 1994 deprived British television of its most controversial figure. Potter was a prolific writer of genius. Yet while his subversive television plays, such as Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, scandalized and delighted the nation, they also made him the butt of the tabloids, who nicknamed him 'Dirty Den' for his 1989 serial Blackeyes. Humphrey Carpenter, acclaimed biographer of Tolkien, Auden, Pound, Britten and Robert Runcie, interviewed everyone who came close to Potter, and had exclusive access to Potter's archives, including the many unmade television and film scripts. Carpenter portrays a very different Potter from the aggressive public image: a deeply shy and reclusive man, who was psychologically as well as physically scarred by the illness which struck him down at the age of twenty-six. Potter was a man with a vast interest in sex but also a terrible loathing of it, thanks to an appalling experience he suffered in childhood. Potter was a man much gossiped about. Carpenter's remarkable biography establishes the extraordinary truth behind the rumours; describes Potter's strange, obsessive relationships with women such as Gina Bellman, who played Blackeyes; and gives a vivid portrait of the backstage dramas and fights behind Potter's screen triumphs. 'What is valuable about this book is that it reveals Potter's real private life, which barely features in his plays ... A wonderfully vivid portrait of the man: his generosity and cruelty, his coarseness and tenderness, and the thwarted sexual yearning that underlay everything.' Lynn Barber, Daily Telegraph

Grove chronicles not only his own fascinating Anglo-Argentinian background growing up in Buenos Aires but also the political history of the tango. He writes, 'In the troubled times of Juan and Evita Peron, the middle classes detested the music and dance so adored by portenos, the ordinary people of Buenos Aires. Too proletarian, sexy and subversive. These days the tango has enthusiasts worldwide, from Finland to Japan, but I didn't see anyone dance it until I was 18 and didn't attempt it myself until I was nearly 60.' He also details the terrifying moment his father was kidnapped by urban guerrillas and his anguish over the Falklands war.

'This is a book about the magazines I have edited. I have written it in order to describe what they were like, and what literary journalism was like, and to do honour to the writers I worked with.' So begins Karl Miller's understated, droll and lucid retrospect of English post-war literary culture. Dark Horses is the vade mecum and memoir of an eminent literary critic and teacher, who also edited several of the most influential literary magazines of his time, and who founded the most influential literary journal of our time, the London Review of Books. It is the testament of a watchful and undeceived intelligence, of wide and sometimes surprising sympathies, as observant about football as about politics and letters. In its feeling for outsiders as well as its understanding of insiders, Dark Horses fulfills the promises of its title. 'Frank Kermode has written of "the good writing that cannot help eliminating truth from autobiography." Karl Miller comes marvellously close to bringing the two together.' Financial Times 'Miller's prose is elegant, spare and unforced. He has the true art of the memoirist.' Jonathan Bate

'Miller was in his mother's womb when she left his father in London, bringing to an end a brief marriage. Rebecca's Vest treats subsequent beginnings and phases of his life: orphan-like upbringing by female relatives in the heart of Midlothian; national service; Cambridge and the start of his career in London, which was to culminate in his founding editorship of the London Review of Books ... Karl Miller is as generously sensitive to the gifts and style of others as he is savagely precise about his own shortcomings.' Mick Imlah 'Like walking barefoot on sharp pebbles - and worth every memorable, searing step.' Valentine Cunningham 'A dry, witty, elegant book, Rebecca's Vest stays in my mind while other books fade.' Doris Lessing 'Fascinated by doubleness, the author of a highly original critical work on the subject, Miller calls himself a double man, but understates the case. There are more than two of him in there.' Clive James

For Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies (1848-87) was more than a nature writer: he was a guiding spirit of the English landscape who affected a profound influence upon Thomas's own writings. From his boyhood days, Thomas regarded Jefferies' The Amateur Poacher (1879) among his favourite books for its eerie capture of 'the free air-open', and as Thomas himself grew into an adept chronicler of the English countryside he would return to his mentor with this astute critical biography. First published in 1909, Richard Jefferies is a subtle account of the nineteenth-century writer's life and an illuminating study of a body of work which Thomas once described as 'a gospel, an incantation'.

'I was never a great amorist,' wrote H. G. Wells in his Experiment in Autobiography in 1934, 'though I have loved several people very deeply.' H. G. Wells composed his most candid volume of autobiography, H. G. Wells in Love, secretly, knowing it would never be published in his own lifetime. It is a great writer's true confession of the loves of his life, beginning in the 1930s when Wells was at the summit of fame having published The Invisible Man, Kipps, and The War of the Worlds. Though he had already written his published autobiography (the two volumes of Experiment in Autobiography are also available as Faber Finds), he saved his most private reflections for this, detailing his engagement in a series of romantic affairs, including his famous liason with feminist author Rebecca West, twenty-six years his junior, and his second wife, Amy Catherine Robbins. This volume completes and complements the published volumes and offers a unique insight into the life of one of the best-loved of British writers.

H. G. Wells's An Experiment in Autobiography, subtitled, with typically Wellsian self-effacement, 'Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)', first appeared in 1934, when Wells was sixty-eight years old, and is presented in Faber Finds in two volumes (also in the Faber Finds imprint is H. G. Wells in Love, which Wells drafted as 'Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography' and can be read as an accompaniment to these volumes).

In these volumes, Wells relates his early life, student days, struggles to make a living, ascent to literary supremacy, and later career as prophet of socialism. We follow him from the beginnings of his thoughts to his crowning conclusion 'This particular brain ... has arrived at the establishment of the Socialist World-State as its directive purpose and has made that its religion and end'.

On reading this remarkable account, President Roosevelt wrote to Wells to say:

'Experiment in Autobiography was for me an experiment in staying awake instead of putting the light out. How do you manage to retain such vivid pictures of events and such extraordinarily clear impressions and judgements?'

These are indeed the conclusions of an extraordinary brain and a remarkable individual.

H. G. Wells's An Experiment in Autobiography, subtitled, with typically Wellsian self-effacement, 'Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)', first appeared in 1934, when Wells was sixty-eight years old, and is presented in Faber Finds in two volumes (also in the Faber Finds imprint is H. G. Wells in Love, which Wells drafted as 'Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography' and can be read as an accompaniment to these volumes).

In these volumes, Wells relates his early life, student days, struggles to make a living, ascent to literary supremacy, and later career as prophet of socialism. We follow him from the beginnings of his thoughts to his crowning conclusion 'This particular brain ... has arrived at the establishment of the Socialist World-State as its directive purpose and has made that its religion and end.'

On reading this remarkable account, President Roosevelt wrote to Wells to say:

'An Experiment in Autobiography was for me an experiment in staying awake instead of putting the light out. How do you manage to retain such vivid pictures of events and such extraordinarily clear impressions and judgements?'

These are indeed the conclusions of an extraordinary brain and a remarkable individual.

Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) , pronounced to rhyme with 'know it', although never debunked as such by Lytton Strachey was nothing if not an Eminent Victorian: English scholar, classicist and theologian, and Master of Balliol College. First published in 1957, Geoffrey Faber's biography still holds its own. To quote from some of the original reviews: 'Sir Geoffrey Faber is admirably equipped for his task ... In an urbane prose he reveals intimacy with the background, command of detail, psychological acumen and sympathy with his subject. I hope that this long book may prove as popular as his ''Oxford Apostles'' to which it forms a complement'. Raymond Mortimer, Sunday Times ' ... this fine biography ... filled with some fascinating by-paths of Oxford history, but never losing sight of the strange, imperious bachelor who forms its theme ... Sir Geoffrey places all serious students of the Victorian age deeply in his debt'. Roger Fulford, Manchester Guardian

Alexander Herzen's own brilliance and the extraordinary circumstances of his life combine to place his memoirs among the great testimonies of the modern era. Born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian landowner, he became one of the most important revolutionary and intellectual figures of his time - as theorist, polemicist and political actor; and fifty years after his death Lenin pronounced him 'the father of Russian socialism'.

My Past and Thoughts uniquely assimilates the personal to the historical, and is both a classic of autobiography an an unparalleled record of his century's remarkable life. His account of a privileged childhood among the Russian aristocracy is illuminated with the insight of a great novelist; his friends and enemies - Marx, Wagner, Mill, Bakunin, Garibaldi, Kropotkin - are brought brilliantly to life; and as a sceptical and free-thinking observer, he unerringly traces the line of revolutionary development, from the earliest stirrings of Russian radicalism through the tumultuous ideological debates of the International.

'His power of observation is extraordinary. He tells a story with the economy of a great reporter. His gift is for knowing not only what people are, but how they are historically situated. Somewhere in the pages of this hard, honest observer of what movements do to men, we shall find ourselves.' - V.S. Pritchett

Alexander Herzen's own brilliance and the extraordinary circumstances of his life combine to place his memoirs among the great testimonies of the modern era. Born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian landowner, he became one of the most important revolutionary and intellectual figures of his time - as theorist, polemicist and political actor; and fifty years after his death Lenin pronounced him 'the father of Russian socialism'. My Past and Thoughts uniquely assimilates the personal to the historical, and is both a classic of autobiography an an unparalleled record of his century's remarkable life. His account of a privileged childhood among the Russian aristocracy is illuminated with the insight of a great novelist; his friends and enemies - Marx, Wagner, Mill, Bakunin, Garibaldi, Kropotkin - are brought brilliantly to life; and as a sceptical and free-thinking observer, he unerringly traces the line of revolutionary development, from the earliest stirrings of Russian radicalism through the tumultuous ideological debates of the International. 'His power of observation is extraordinary. He tells a story with the economy of a great reporter. His gift is for knowing not only what people are, but how they are historically situated. Somewhere in the pages of this hard, honest observer of what movements do to men, we shall find ourselves.' - V.S. Pritchett