|
Books > Biography > Literary
The definitive and revealing biography of the author of The Secret
Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett's favourite theme in her fiction
was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of
poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with
her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by
the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to
help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she
publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom.
On the surface, Frances' life was extremely successful: hosting
regular literary salons in her home and travelling frequently
between properties in the UK and America. But behind the colourful
personal and social life, she was a complex and contradictory
character. She lost both parents by her twenty-first birthday,
Henry James called her "the most heavenly of women" although
avoided her; prominent people admired her and there were many
friendships as well as an ill-advised marriage to a much younger
man that ended in heartache. Her success was punctuated by periods
of depression, in one instance brought on by the tragic loss of her
eldest son to consumption. Ann Thwaite creates a sympathetic but
balanced and eye-opening biography of the woman who has enchanted
numerous generations of children.
An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, "A
Writer's Diary" was drawn by her husband from the personal record
she kept over a period of twenty-seven years. Included are entries
that refer to her own writing and those that are clearly writing
exercises, accounts of people and scenes relevant to the raw
material of her work, and finally, comments on books she was
reading. The first entry is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks
before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the
private world - the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision - of
one of the great writers of our century.
Acclaimed British historian examines the layers of craft and
insight in Tobias Smollett, and discusses the particular nature of
his genius and influence on British culture. Once again, Black
acquaints the reader with the full range of a prolific writer's
works and offers a backstage tour of the meaning and context of
Britain's most beloved stories and story-tellers.
Oxford thought it was at war. And then it was. After the horrors of
the First World War, Oxford looked like an Arcadia - a dreamworld -
from which pain could be shut out. Soldiers arrived with pictures
of the university fully formed in their heads, and women finally
won the right to earn degrees. Freedom meant reading beneath the
spires and punting down the river with champagne picnics. But all
was not quite as it seemed. Boys fresh from school settled into
lecture rooms alongside men who had returned from the trenches with
the beginnings of shellshock. It was displacing to be surrounded by
aristocrats who liked nothing better than to burn furniture from
each other's rooms on the college quads for kicks. The women of
Oxford still faced a battle to emerge from their shadows. And among
the dons a major conflict was beginning to brew. Set in the world
that Evelyn Waugh immortalised in Brideshead Revisited, this is a
true and often funny story of the thriving of knowledge and spirit
of fun and foreboding that characterised Oxford between the two
world wars. One of the protagonists, in fact, was a friend of Waugh
and inspired a character in his novel. Another married into the
family who inhabited Castle Howard and befriended everyone from
George Bernard Shaw to Virginia Woolf. The third was an Irish
occultist and correspondent with the poets W. H. Auden, Louis
MacNeice and W. B. Yeats. This singular tale of Oxford colleagues
and rivals encapsulates the false sense of security that developed
across the country in the interwar years. With the rise of Hitler
and the Third Reich came the subversion of history for propaganda.
In academic Oxford, the fight was on not only to preserve the past
from the hands of the Nazis, but also to triumph, one don over
another, as they became embroiled in a war of their own.
Oliver Goldsmith arrived in England in 1756 a penniless Irishman.
He toiled for years in the anonymity of Grub Street-already a
synonym for impoverished hack writers-before he became one of
literary London's most celebrated authors. Norma Clarke tells the
extraordinary story of this destitute scribbler turned gentleman of
letters as it unfolds in the early days of commercial publishing,
when writers' livelihoods came to depend on the reading public, not
aristocratic patrons. Clarke examines a network of writers
radiating outward from Goldsmith: the famous and celebrated authors
of Dr. Johnson's "Club" and those far less fortunate "brothers of
the quill" trapped in Grub Street. Clarke emphasizes Goldsmith's
sense of himself as an Irishman, showing that many of his early
literary acquaintances were Irish emigres: Samuel Derrick, John
Pilkington, Paul Hiffernan, and Edward Purdon. These writers
tutored Goldsmith in the ways of Grub Street, and their influence
on his development has not previously been explored. Also Irish was
the patron he acquired after 1764, Robert Nugent, Lord Clare.
Clarke places Goldsmith in the tradition of Anglo-Irish satirists
beginning with Jonathan Swift. He transmuted troubling truths about
the British Empire into forms of fable and nostalgia whose undertow
of Irish indignation remains perceptible, if just barely, beneath
an equanimous English surface. To read Brothers of the Quill is to
be taken by the hand into the darker corners of eighteenth-century
Grub Street, and to laugh and cry at the absurdities of the writing
life.
The autobiography by A S Mopeli-Paulus, author of the best-selling
Blanket Boy's Moon and of its equally prestigious follow-up, Turn
to the Dark. Although substantial excerpts were published in Drum
magazine at the time of composition in the mid-1950s, this is the
first appearance of the complete text. Whether running away from
school, serving in the 'Grave Unit' during the Battle of El Alamein
or proving an extraordinary leader through the early days of the
anti-apartheid struggle, here is the testimony of a vibrant writer.
'The manuscript of The World and the Cattle is very valuable
because it identifies the ambiguities the Mopelis adopted towards
the different forces which formed the environment of this little
Basotho clan, clinging precariously to their land and cattle on the
slopes of the Drakensberg.' Alf Stadler in a 1987 paper.
Originally published in English in 1951, this biography of one of
Germany's foremost mystical poets dis-proves many of the myths
surrounding Rainer Maria Rilke and examines his life and work from
social, historical and psychological perspectives, while all the
time referencing Rilke's works to his complex personality. The
legacy of his work on younger generations is also examined. All
German prose quotations have been translated into English for this
edition, existing translations used for the German poetry.
Onyeka Nwelue: A Troubled Life is a portrait of the writers
predicaments and triumphs as he courses through experiences that
are sometimes grim, and other times, spectacular.
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood
High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with
the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The
photograph made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent
the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip,
honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for
Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were
the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to
name but a very few. Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days
numbered, Babitz was discovered-as a writer-by Joan Didion. She
would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or
short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals.
Under-known and under-read during her career, she's since
experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she's on the
cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential-as the
essential-LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art
that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so simply enjoyable as
to be mistaken for simple entertainment. What Hollywood's Eve has
going for it on every page is its subject's utter refusal to be
dull... It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz." The
New York Times "Read Lili Anolik's book in the same spirit you'd
read a new Eve Babitz, if there was one: for the gossip and for the
writing. Both are extraordinary." Jonathan Lethem "There's no
better way to look at Hollywood in that magic decade, the 1970s,
than through Eve Babitz's eyes. Eve knew everyone, slept with
everyone, used, amused, and abused everyone. And then there's Eve
herself: a cult figure turned into a legend in Anolik's
electrifying book. This is a portrait as mysterious, maddening-and
seductive-as its subject." -Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders,
Raging Bulls For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a
freak fire turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West
Hollywood, where author Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012.
Hollywood's Eve, equal parts biography and detective story "brings
a ludicrously glamorous scene back to life, adding a few shadows
along the way" (Vogue) and "sends you racing to read the work of
Eve Babitz" (The New York Times).
First published in 1836, this lively two-volume autobiography of
Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) reveals the background and
mindset of this fascinating character. Best-known for helping to
stimulate interest in bibliography and for his enthusiasm in
promoting book collecting among the aristocracy, the English
bibliographer adopts a conversational and anecdotal tone as he
shares the details of his life and work with the reader. Volume 2
begins with Dibdin's experiences at Althorp, describing how the
rich library there was thrown open to him. He then continues his
detailed discussion of his publications, and focuses on his life in
London, before the final chapter turns to private libraries and
their importance in his life. Drawing upon letters and literature
throughout, Dibdin recounts many entertaining tales, including an
unfortunate encounter with a 'savage-hearted critic' at a dinner
party, and introduces the influential characters he meets along the
way.
Alun, Gweno and Freda is a radical reworking of John Pikoulis's
classic biography, Alun Lewis: A Life (Seren, 1984) with new
material which sheds further light on the greatest writer of the
Second World War, Alun Lewis (1915-1944). Born in the impoverished
industrial valleys of south Wales, the story of Lewis has many
varied aspects - he was a talented academic, a gifted writer, a
depressive personality, politically aspirational in left wing
terms, a pacifist by nature who was faced with a war against
fascism. In the course of the war he became caught between two
women on opposite sides of the world, his wife Gweno and Freda
Aykroyd, an ex patriot in India whose house provided respite for
officers on leave there. Lewis's relationships with Gweno and Freda
informed his poetry but also contributed to an inevitable emotional
turmoil. He died in mysterious circumstances on active service in
Burma: was his death an accident or suicide? And did his triangular
relationship with Gweno and Freda contribute to the ending of his
life? Essentially the story of Lewis's short and sometimes tortured
life, the book is also the story about how it was written. It
quotes extensively from interviews with and correspondence from the
main players in the story, and explores the sometimes difficult and
delicate territories to be negotiated by the biographer as a story
unfolds.
This tender and personal memoir by the poet Joanna Ramsey of George
Mackay Brown gives an account of some aspects of the last eight
years of his life in Stromness, Orkney, and of the friendship
between them. It also provides a background to his poem 'A New
Child: ECL 11 June 1993' (included in the anthology Following a
Lark), which he wrote for Joanna's daughter. There are many small
details of George's day to day life in those last years that are
not included in any other account. Also included are an unpublished
poem written for Joanna, and a number of birthday acrostics written
for her and her daughter, Emma. In his final years George Mackay
Brown rarely travelled beyond Stromness, but many of his friends
visited him there; the book is also peopled by George's other
friends, and paints a portrait of a man who remained very dear and
important to others until his death and beyond it.
|
On Lighthouses
(Paperback)
Jazmina Barrera; Translated by Christina MacSweeney
|
R336
R277
Discovery Miles 2 770
Save R59 (18%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient
grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey,
endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local
"powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in
St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age-and has to
live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San
Francisco, Maya learns about love for herself and the kindness of
others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I
met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to
be free instead of imprisoned.
Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a modern
American classic that will touch hearts and change minds for as
long as people read.
In 1911, the New York Times alerted its readers to the forthcoming
'authoritative' biography of Ruskin with the words 'out of a life's
devotion to Ruskin and the Herculean task of editing the definitive
Ruskin, Mr E. T. Cook is to give us a definitive Ruskin biography
also. It will have the authority of a brilliant Oxford scholar,
combined with the charm and lightness of a style which makes Mr
Cook one of the first of English journalists'. Cook had been given
complete access to Ruskin's diaries, notebooks and letters by his
literary executors, and Ruskin's family and friends co-operated
fully with him. His depth of knowledge of, and sympathy for, his
subject make Cook's biography a vital tool for anyone wishing to
understand Ruskin's extraordinary achievements in so many fields.
Volume 1 covers the period to 1860, the year in which the final
volume of Modern Painters was published.
In 1911, the New York Times alerted its readers to the forthcoming
'authoritative' biography of Ruskin with the words 'out of a life's
devotion to Ruskin and the Herculean task of editing the definitive
Ruskin, Mr E. T. Cook is to give us a definitive Ruskin biography
also. It will have the authority of a brilliant Oxford scholar,
combined with the charm and lightness of a style which makes Mr
Cook one of the first of English journalists'. Cook had been given
complete access to Ruskin's diaries, notebooks and letters by his
literary executors, and Ruskin's family and friends co-operated
fully with him. His depth of knowledge of, and sympathy for, his
subject make Cook's biography a vital tool for anyone wishing to
understand Ruskin's extraordinary achievements in so many fields.
Volume 2 covers the period from 1860 to Ruskin's death in 1900, and
includes an index to both volumes.
This volume examines the ways in which multilingual women authors
incorporate several languages into their life writing. It compares
the work of six contemporary authors who write predominantly in
French. It analyses the narrative strategies they develop to
incorporate more than one language into their life writing: French
and English, French and Creole, or French and German, for example.
The book demonstrates how women writers transform languages to
invent new linguistic formations and how they create new
formulations of subjectivity within their self-narrative. It
intervenes in current debates over global literature, national
literatures and translingual and transnational writing, which
constitute major areas of research in literary and cultural
studies. It also contributes to debates in linguistics through its
theoretical framework of translanguaging. It argues that
multilingual authors create new paradigms for life writing and that
they question our understanding of categories such as "French
literature."
A groundbreaking biography of Milton's formative years that
provides a new account of the poet's political radicalization John
Milton (1608-1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual
history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative
poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I
that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing
Milton's literary, intellectual, and political development with
unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an
unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that
would go on to create Paradise Lost-but would first justify the
killing of a king. Biographers of Milton have always struggled to
explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide
and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious
toleration, and republicanism. In this groundbreaking intellectual
biography of Milton's formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on
recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and
polemicist. He charts Milton's development from his earliest days
as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in
Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil
War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual
readings of Milton's best-known works from this period, including
the "Nativity Ode," "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," Comus, and
"Lycidas." Challenging biographers who claim that Milton was always
a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that
provoked civil war in England combined with Milton's astonishing
programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape
not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece.
This book, first published in 1984, was the first full biography of
Solzhenitsyn. Starting with his childhood, it covers every period
of his life in considerable detail, showing how Solzhenitsyn's
development paralleled and mirrored the development of Soviet
society: ambitious and idealistic in the twenties and thirties,
preoccupied with the struggle for survival in the forties, hopeful
in the fifties and sixties and disillusioned in the seventies.
Solzhenitsyn's life thus serves as a paradigm for the history of
twentieth-century Communism and for the intelligentsia's attitudes
to Communism. At the same time, this book relates Solzhenitsyn's
life to his works, all of which contain a large element of
autobiography.
This book, first published in 1950, is a balanced examination of
Chekhov's life and work, a critical analysis of his stories and
plays set against the background of his life the Russia of the day.
Using Chekhov's works, biographical details, and, more importantly,
his many thousands of letters, this book presents a comprehensive
critical study of the writer and the man.
|
|