Memorials of Harriet Martineau by Maria Weston Chapman was published in 1877 as volume three of Harriet Martineau's Autobiography. While the triple-decker was a popular format of the era, the configuration of a two-volume autobiography authored by one and a one-volume biography written by another is unusual. Indeed, the work's publishing history reveals that, in reissues of the Autobiography, the Memorials volume was not reproduced; while some might claim that the problem is with the editor-American abolitionist Chapman-rather than the contents, the fact remains that the bulk of the volume consists of primary materials written by Martineau that are available nowhere else, published or archival. Chapman's participation in the project was originally conceived as supplemental, in the event that the ailing Martineau did not live long enough to complete her memoirs; as it happened, Martineau-who finished the two volumes and had them privately printed in 1855-lived another twenty-one years. Whereas the Autobiography records what Martineau called the "interior life" or subjective perspective on her career, Chapman's volume addressed the exterior by offering a biographical overview of her friend's life and work, a record of her last decades, and a collection of posthumous memorials by those with whom her private and public lives intersected. Chapman's role was to "take up the parallel thread of her exterior life,-to gather up and co-ordinate from the materials placed in my hands the illustrative facts and fragments by her omitted or forgotten; and to show . . . what no mind can see for itself,-the effect of its own personality on the world." This volume is the first scholarly edition of the Memorials-a biography of one of the foremost intellectual women of the nineteenth century, told primarily in her own words.

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Few would question that Albert Camus (1913-1960), novelist, playwright, philosopher and journalist, is a major cultural icon. His widely quoted works have led to countless movie adaptions, graphic novels, pop songs, and even t-shirts. In this Very Short Introduction, Oliver Gloag chronicles the inspiring story of Camus' life. From a poor fatherless settler in French-Algeria to the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gloag offers a comprehensive view of Camus' major works and interventions, including his notion of the absurd and revolt, as well as his highly original concept of pure happiness through unity with nature called "bonheur". This original introduction also addresses debates on coloniality, which have arisen around Camus' work. Gloag presents Camus in all his complexity a staunch defender of many progressive causes, fiercely attached to his French-Algerian roots, a writer of enormous talent and social awareness plagued by self-doubt, and a crucially relevant author whose major works continue to significantly impact our views on contemporary issues and events. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

A SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'The best biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands 'Spectacular' Observer 'A remarkable portrait' Guardian W. G. Sebald was one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of the twentieth century. Through books including The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, he pursued an original literary vision that combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile. The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence pursues the true Sebald through the memories of those who knew him and through the work he left behind. This quest takes Carole Angier from Sebald's birth as a second-generation German at the end of the Second World War, through his rejection of the poisoned inheritance of the Third Reich, to his emigration to England, exploring the choice of isolation and exile that drove his work. It digs deep into a creative mind on the edge, finding profound empathy and paradoxical ruthlessness, saving humour, and an elusive mix of fact and fiction in his life as well as work. The result is a unique, ferociously original portrait.

This collection represents some of the best recent critical writing on Edmund Spenser, a major Renaissance English poet. The essays cover the whole of Spensers work, from early literary experiments such as The Shepeardes Calendar, to his unfinished crowning work,The Fairie Queene. The introduction provides an overview of critical responses to Spenser, setting his work and the debates which it has generated in their perspective contexts: new historicist, post-structural, psychoanalytic and feminist. His study also covers the critical responses of leading British, Irish and American scholars.

His keen grasp of human nature and a unique style of verse made Ogden Nash, in the mid-twentieth century, the most widely read and frequently quoted poet of his time. For years, readers have longed for a biography to match Nash's charm, wit, and good nature; now we have it in Douglas Parker's absorbing and delightful life of the poet. Intelligent, informative, and engaging.... There is no comparable study not only of Nash's life but also of the role that poetry, especially comic verse, played in modern American literary culture.... A story long overdue in the telling. -Dana Gioia

Ernest Hemingway was an involuntary chameleon, who would shift seamlessly from a self-cultivated image of hero, aesthetic radical, and existential non-conformist to a figure made up at various points of selfishness, hypocrisy, self-delusion, narcissism and arbitrary vindictiveness. Richard Bradford shows that Hemingway's work is by parts erratic and unique because it was tied into these unpredictable, bizarre features of his personality. Impressionism and subjectivity always play some part in the making of literary works. Some authors try to subdue them while others treat them as the essentials of creativity but they endure as a ubiquitous element of all literature. They are the writer's private signature, their authorial fingerprint. In this ground-breaking and intensely revealing new biography, including previously unpublished letters from the Hemingway archives, Richard Bradford reveals how Hemingway all but erased his own existence through a lifetime of invention and delusion, and provides the reader with a completely new understanding of the Hemingway oeuvre.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt award for biography, this remarkable portrait sheds new light on Virginia Woolf's relationships with her family and friends and how they shaped her work. Virginia Woolf: A Portrait blends recently unearthed documents, key primary sources, and personal interviews with Woolf's relatives and other acquaintances to render in unmatched detail the author's complicated relationship with her husband, Leonard; her father, Leslie Stephen; and her half-sister, Vanessa Bell. Forrester connects these figures to Woolf's mental breakdown while introducing the concept of "Virginia seule," or Virginia alone: an uncommon paragon of female strength and conviction. Forrester's biography inhabits her characters and vivifies their perspective, weaving a colorful, intense drama that forces readers to rethink their understanding of Woolf, her writing, and her world.

This book, the second of two volumes anticipating the bicentenary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray in 1811, details not only the author's life, but also the cosmopolitan and literary worlds inhabited by his two daughters, Minny and Annie. Memory and Legacy continues the family saga long after Thackeray's death, tracing the later lives of his two daughters and their marriages. Minny would marry Leslie Stephen, later father of Virginia Woolf, but would die in premature labour at the age of just thirty-five. With her death, the narrative takes as its focus Thackeray's elder daughter Annie, as she overcomes the loss of her sister and goes on to build a life of her own. Encouraged in early years by her father, Annie would herself emerge as a successful novelist, though one always living, albeit willingly, within her father's shadow. In particular, she took responsibility for guarding and shaping her father's legacy until her own death in 1919. Drawing extensively on the letters, diaries, journals and notebooks of the Thackerays and their circle, Aplin sheds light on this remarkable man's family, and the effect that his life, death and legacy had on those closest to him. The first biography of the Thackeray family circle since that of Gordon Ray in 1958, Aplin's two-part study incorporates significant new documentary evidence, some of it never previously seen by Thackeray scholars, and includes the fullest and frankest examination of the lives of Thackeray's two daughters yet published. Illustrated with portraits, group photographs, and original sketches by the Thackerays, this book is a wholly new reappraisal of Thackeray's life, writing, and legacy through the lens that truly defined him - his family. It will appeal not just to those interested in Thackeray and the Victorians, but also to readers of biography, women's studies and memoirs, and to followers of Viriginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Published in 1999. Lord Byron and Madam de Stael made a great impression on Europe in the throes of the Napoleonic Wars, through their personalities, the versions of themselves which they projected through their works, and their literary engagement with contemporary life. However, the strong links between them have never before been explored in detail. This pioneering study looks at their personal relations, from their verbal sparring in Regency society, through the friendship which developed in Switzerland after Byron left England in 1816, to Byron's tributes to Mme de Stael after her death. It concentrates on their literary links, both direct responses to each other's works, and the copious evidence of shared concerns. The study deals with their treatment of gender, their grappling with the possibilities for heroic endeavour, their engagement with the social and political situations of Britain, France and Italy, and their conceptions of the role of the writer. Although Byron will need no introduction, Mme de Stael's standing as a French romantic writer of the first rank is made plain by the strong impact of her writings on the English Poet.

One of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers turns her attention to one of the country's greatest novelists: James Joyce - in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the iconic classic ULYSSES. 'As skilful, stylish and pacy as one would expect from so adept a novelist' Sunday Telegraph 'A delight from start to finish . . . achieves the near impossibility of giving a thoroughly fresh view of Joyce' Sunday Times 'Accessible and passionate, it is a book which should bring Joyce in all his glory and agony to a new and very wide audience' Irish Independent Edna O'Brien depicts James Joyce as a man hammered by Church, State and family, yet from such adversities he wrote works 'to bestir the hearts of men and angels'. The journey begins with Joyce the arrogant youth, his lofty courtship of Nora Barnacle, their hectic sexuality, children, wanderings, debt and profligacy, and Joyce's obsession with the city of Dublin, which he would re-render through his words. Nor does Edna O'Brien spare us the anger and isolation of Joyce's later years, when he felt that the world had turned its back on him, and she asks how could it be otherwise for a man who knew that conflict is the source of all creation.

Regarded as a titanic artistic and aesthetic achievement, the influential literary magazine The Dial published most of the great modernist writers, artists, and critics of its day. As publisher and editor of The Dial from 1920 to 1926, Scofield Thayer was gatekeeper and guide for the movement. His editorial curation introduced the ideas of literary modernism to America and gave American artists a new audience in Europe. In The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer James Dempsey looks beyond the public figure best known for publishing the work of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore to reveal a paradoxical man fraught with indecisions and insatiable appetites, and deeply conflicted about the artistic movement to which he was benefactor and patron. Thayer suffered from schizophrenia and faded from public life upon his resignation from The Dial. His struggle with mental illness and his controversial personal life led his guardians to prohibit anything of a personal nature from appearing in previous biographies. The story of Thayer's unmoored and peripatetic life, which in many ways mirrored the cosmopolitan rootlessness of modernism, has never been fully told until now.

In 1988 Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's most famous novelist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is the first comprehensive study of the writer and his achievement.
Rasheed El-Enany presents a systematic evaluation of the author's life and environment. He traces the local and foreign influences on Mahfouz's work, elements of his thought and technique, and the evolution of his craft. As well as tracing the thematic and aesthetic continuity in Mahfouz's writing, the volume also discusses each of his works individually. The story that emerges is one of Mahfouz's struggle to free his novels from prevalent, predominantly Western moulds, and to express his own socio-political thought within the Arabic tradition.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203416805

'Among the wealthy elders, my views gave some offence. Two or three people walked out of my lecture in Hamburg. At a dinner in Oldenburg I was seated next to a senior academic who berated me for my leftist leanings - not what he expected of an Oxford professor...' John Carey, best known for his provocative stance on the arts and the academic establishment, looks back on his journey from an ordinary background to Oxford's oldest literary professorship. Books formed the backbone of his life: from Biggles in his boyhood home to G. K. Chesterton in his West London grammar school to rigorous scholarship on Milton, Donne and many others. In this warm and funny memoir, he remembers afresh his encounters with the great (and not so great) works of English literature - the rewards, fulfilment and sheer pleasure to be found there.

From journalist Michelle Dean, winner of the National Book Critics Circle's 2016 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Sharp combines biography, original research, and critical reading into a powerful portrait of ten writers who managed to make their voices heard amidst a climate of sexism and nepotism, from the 1920s to the 1990s. Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Renata Adler, Pauline Kael, and Nora Ephron-these are the main characters of Sharp. Their lives intertwine. They enable each other and feud, manufacture unique spaces and voices, and haunt each other. They form a group united in many ways, but especially by what Dean terms as 'sharpness', the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit, a claiming of power through writing rather than position. Sharp is a vibrant and rich depiction of the intellectual beau monde of New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slanging-matches in the pages of publications like the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books, as well as a carefully considered portrayal of the rise of feminism and its interaction with the critical establishment. Sharp is for book lovers who want to read about their favorite writers, lovers of New Yorker lore, aspiring writers in New York, those interested in the history of ideas, and of the fray of 20th century debate-and it will satisfy them all.

The superb classic memoir from a dazzlingly eccentric and endlessly fascinating author and feminist icon - a woman very much ahead of her time - including her time spent on the glorious island of Skiathos 'A happy, hilarious book' Daily Express Nancy Spain was one of the most celebrated - and notorious - writers and broadcasters of the 50s and 60s. Witty, controversial and brilliant, she lived openly as a lesbian (sharing a household with her two lovers and their various children) and was frequently litigated against for her newspaper columns - Evelyn Waugh successfully sued her for libel... twice. Nancy Spain had a deep love of the Mediterranean. So it was no surprise when, in the 1960s, she decided to build a place of her own on the Greek island of Skiathos. With an impractical nature surpassed only by her passion for the project, and despite many obstacles, she gloriously succeeded. This classic memoir is infused with all Spain's chaotic brilliance, zest for life and single-minded pursuit of a life worth living. Perfect for fans of A PLACE IN THE SUN and ESCAPE TO THE COUNTRY 'Full of fun, and that zest of intelligence that never left her' Sunday Times

H. P. Lovecraft is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of modern horror fiction and a pervasive influence on popular culture. His monstrous creations have influenced the look of films such as "Alien," "Hellboy" and even "Pirates of the Caribbean," and his most memorable creatures have featured in almost every form of fantasy art. Yet this eccentric and reclusive resident of Providence, Rhode Island, did not have a book published during his lifetime and died at the age of 46 in comparative obscurity, convinced that he had failed to achieve the recognition he deserved.
In this comprehensive new biography, author Paul Roland examines the life and work of the man Stephen King called "the 20th century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale," and reveals that Lovecraft's vision was a projection of his inner demons, his recurring nightmares and his inability to live in what he considered a hostile world.
The book is illustrated with rare personal sketches of his creations by Lovecraft himself, images pulp fiction magazines of the period, film stills and posters, comic strip and graphic novel panels, family photographs, as well as facsimiles of private correspondence, original manuscripts and diary extracts in Lovecraft's own hand.

First published in 1957, this book explores what remained of Joyce's background, not only in Ireland but in those cities abroad where his books were written. With the co-operation of those who knew the author, including his brother, much new material was brought together to shed new light on Joyce's life, character and methods of writing. The author traces Joyce, and his writings, from his beginnings in Ireland, through Zurich, London and Paris, to his difficult final year at Vichy in 1940. Previously unpublished letters illustrate his relationships with important figures of the period like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and H.G. Wells. This title will be of interest to student of literature.

'If a thing loves, it is infinite' William Blake A short, impassioned argument for why the visionary artist William Blake is important in the twenty-first century The visionary poet and painter William Blake is a constant presence throughout contemporary culture - from videogames to novels, from sporting events to political rallies and from horror films to designer fashion. Although he died nearly 200 years ago, something about his work continues to haunt the twenty-first century. What is it about Blake that has so endured? In this illuminating essay, John Higgs takes us on a whirlwind tour to prove that far from being the mere New Age counterculture figure that many assume him to be, Blake is now more relevant than ever.

"It is not only the Hammer films based on Dennis Wheatley's novels that are full-blooded, sensational entertainment, so was Wheatley's life, brilliantly evoked by Phil Baker. This gripping biography draws out all the comedy from Wheatley's history, from his childhood in a family of wine merchants who were dedicated to social climbing (the scrambling for status never left Wheatley either, even in his 70's he was proudly joining gentlemen's clubs such as White's) to his experiences in World War One. Wheatley's main ambition as a soldier was to join a socially acceptable regiment, but the Westminster Dragoons wouldn't have him because he couldn't ride (he claimed that he could but his first time on a horse rather exposed this lie), he was too short for the Artist's Rifles and so he ended up in the Artillery. He spent most of the War attending training camps and hunting for casual sex (and writing his first, unpublished, novel), before being sent to the Western Front in 1917. A business disaster, along with the Depression, led him to turn his attention to writing novels as a means of escaping penury (an unconventional idea for becoming rich) and after selling 50 million books he succeeded. Wheatley lived on a grand scale, rather like a real-life bon vivant James Bond, of fine dining, expensive wines and even more expensive cigars. Phil Baker captures Wheatley's personality, as well as the lurid extremes of his novels (their occult settings, the constant promise of orgies and threats to virgins). For such a detailed book The Devil is a Gentleman is astonishingly readable, as page-turning as Wheatley's own novels.James Doyle in Book Munch

Emile Zola was the leader of the literary movement known as 'naturalism' and is one of the great figures of the novel. In his monumental Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), he explored the social and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century in ways that scandalized bourgeois society. Zola opened the novel up to a new realm of subjects, including the realities of working-class life, class relations, and questions of gender and sexuality, and his writing embodied a new freedom of expression, with his bold, outspoken voice often inviting controversy. In this Very Short Introduction, Brian Nelson examines Zola's major themes and narrative art. He illuminates the social and political contexts of Zola's work, and provides readings of five individual novels (The Belly of Paris, L'Assommoir, The Ladies' Paradise, Germinal, and Earth). Zola's naturalist theories, which attempted to align literature with science, helped to generate the stereotypical notion that his fiction was somehow nonfictional. Nelson, however, reveals how the most distinctive elements of Zola's writing go far beyond his theoretical naturalism, giving his novels their unique force. Throughout, he sets Zola's work in context, considering his relations with contemporary painters, his role in the Dreyfus Affair, and his eventual murder. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

'For anyone who enjoyed Hillbilly Elegy or Educated, Unfollow is an essential text' - Louis Theroux 'Such a moving, redemptive, clear-eyed account of religious indoctrination' - Pandora Sykes 'A nuanced portrait of the lure and pain of zealotry' New York Times 'Unfolds like a suspense novel . . . A brave, unsettling, and fascinating memoir about the damage done by religious fundamentalism' NPR A Radio Four Book of the Week Pick for June 2021 As featured on the BBC documentaries, 'The Most Hated Family in America' and 'Surviving America's Most Hated Family' It was an upbringing in many ways normal. A loving home, shared with squabbling siblings, overseen by devoted parents. Yet in other ways it was the precise opposite: a revolving door of TV camera crews and documentary makers, a world of extreme discipline, of siblings vanishing in the night. Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church - the fire-and-brimstone religious sect at once aggressively homophobic and anti-Semitic, rejoiceful for AIDS and natural disasters, and notorious for its picketing the funerals of American soldiers. From her first public protest, aged five, to her instrumental role in spreading the church's invective via social media, her formative years brought their difficulties. But being reviled was not one of them. She was preaching God's truth. She was, in her words, 'all in'. In November 2012, at the age of twenty-six, she left the church, her family, and her life behind. Unfollow is a story about the rarest thing of all: a person changing their mind. It is a fascinating insight into a closed world of extreme belief, a biography of a complex family, and a hope-inspiring memoir of a young woman finding the courage to find compassion for others, as well as herself. --- More praise for Unfollow 'A beautiful, gripping book about a singular soul, and an unexpected redemption' - Nick Hornby 'A modern-day parable for how we should speak and listen to each other' - Dolly Alderton 'Her journey - from Westboro to becoming one of the most empathetic, thoughtful, humanistic writers around - is exceptional and inspiring' - Jon Ronson 'A gripping story, beautifully told . . . It takes real talent to produce a book like this. Its message could not be more urgent' Sunday Times

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.

Hualien, on the Pacific coast of eastern Taiwan, and its mountains, especially Mount Qilai, were deeply inspirational for the young poet Yang Mu. A place of immense natural beauty and cultural heterogeneity, the city was also a site of extensive social, political, and cultural change in the twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and the American bombings of World War II to the Chinese civil war, the White Terror, and the Cold War.

Taken as a whole, these evocative and allusive autobiographical essays provide a personal response to history as Taiwan transitioned from a Japanese colony to the Republic of China. Yang Mu recounts his childhood experiences under the Japanese, life in the mountains in proximity to indigenous people as his family took refuge from the American bombings, his initial encounters and cultural conflicts with Nationalist soldiers recently arrived from mainland China, the subsequent activities of the Nationalist government to consolidate power, and the burgeoning of the island's new manufacturing society.

Nevertheless, throughout those early years, Yang Mu remained anchored by a sense of place on Taiwan's eastern coast and amid its coastal mountains, over which stands Mount Qilai like a guardian spirit. This was the formative milieu of the young poet. Yang Mu seized on verse to develop a distinct persona and draw meaning from the currents of change reshuffling his world. These eloquent essays create an exciting, subjective realm meant to transcend the personal and historical limitations of the individual and the end of culture, "plundered and polluted by politics and industry long ago."

Originally published in 1969. In the seventeenth century neither the literary genre nor the term 'autobiography' existed but we see in seventeenth-century literature many kinds of autobiographical writings, to which their authors gave such titles as 'Journal of the Life of Me, Confessions, etc. This work is a study of nearly two hundred of these, published and unpublished, which together represent a very varied group of writings. The book begins with an examination of the rise of autobiography as a genre during the Renaissance. It discusses seventeenth-century autobiographical writings under two main headings - 'religious', where the autobiographies are grouped according to the denomination of their writer, and 'secular', where a wide variety of writings is examined, including accounts of travel and of military and political life, as well as more personal accounts. Autobiographies by women are treated separately, and the author shows that they in general have a deeper revelation of sentiments and more subtle self-analyses than is found in comparable works by men. Sources and influences are recorded and also the essential historical details of each work. This book gives a critical analysis of the autobiographies as literary works and suggests relationships between them and the culture and society of their time. Review of the original publication: "...a contribution to cultural history which is of quite exceptional merit. Its subject is of great intrinsic interest and manifest importance and Professor Delany has treated it with exemplary thoroughness, lucidity, and intelligence." Lionel Trilling