Barbara Hepworth sculpted outdoors and Janet Frame wore earmuffs as she worked to block out noise. Kate Chopin wrote with her six children ‘swarming around her’ whereas the artist Rosa Bonheur filled her bedroom with the sixty birds that inspired her work. Louisa May Alcott wrote so vigorously – skipping sleep and meals – that she had to learn to write with her left hand to give her cramped right hand a break.

From Isak Dinesen subsisting on oysters, champagne and amphetamines, to Isabel Allende's insistence that she begins each new book on 8 January, here are the working routines of over 140 brilliant female painters, composers, sculptors, writers, filmmakers and performers.

Filled with details of the large and small choices these women made, Daily Rituals Women at Work is a source of fascination and inspiration.

Katherine Mansfield is New Zealands most famous author and was arguably the finest short-story writer of her day. This chronology provides a synopsis of her first years in New Zealand and then England and, from 1906, a more detailed account of her last months in her native country, her coming to Europe, meeting Middleton Murry, publishing her stories and finally (before her death at the age of 34) desperately seeeking a cure for her tuberculosis as she continued to write.

This is an imaginative work of literary criticism. Thirteen scholars have selected a wide variety of Joseph Brodsky's poems written between 1970 and 1994 for detailed discussion in the context of his whole output. The choice of poems reflects Brodsky's diversity of themes and devices. Together they offer a perspective on one of the most original and profound modern poets. This collection should fulfil the often-expressed need for a comprehensive approach to the study of Brodsky's poetry, which is linguistically as well as intellectually demanding.

"Island Dreams" is a true story of the wonders of British Columbia's northern Gulf Islands. Swimming in the middle of the Strait of Georgia, these enchanting isles are serenaded by whales and surrounded by crushing depths; caressed by languorous calms and brutalized by terrifying storms.

"Island Dreams" tells of one family's move to Olsen Island, one of the uninhabited gems nestled close by the isle of Lasqueti. Their story tacks through the wild beauty of these islands and dives on glass sponge reefs shimmering in the surrounding depths. It's an exploration of earthquake faults deep below Vancouver Island and the birth of Qualicum winds.

"Island Dreams" also chronicles the natural and anthropological history of the islands-their formation, the glaciers that scoured them, and the first plants and animals that appeared there. It follows the first migrating Asians who skiffed down the coast, and explores the First Nations villages their ancestors founded. The robust cast of characters includes Sisters Islands light keepers and depression-era fishermen who beach-combed lumber for their island fishing shacks.

"Island Dreams" is also a tale of Lasqueti Island, held out of time by the special folks who make it their home. It is a story of islanders, and of the wind and waves that forge them into believers in the redemptive power of a wild environment.

Throughout his life, James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might, he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Boswell's Enlightenment examines the conflicting credos of reason and faith, progress and tradition that pulled Boswell, like so many eighteenth-century Europeans, in opposing directions. In the end, the life of the man best known for writing Samuel Johnson's biography was something of a patchwork affair. As Johnson himself understood: "That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL." Few periods in Boswell's life better crystallize this internal turmoil than 1763-1765, the years of his Grand Tour and the focus of Robert Zaretsky's thrilling intellectual adventure. From the moment Boswell sailed for Holland from the port of Harwich, leaving behind on the beach his newly made friend Dr. Johnson, to his return to Dover from Calais a year and a half later, the young Scot was intent on not just touring historic and religious sites but also canvassing the views of the greatest thinkers of the age. In his relentless quizzing of Voltaire and Rousseau, Hume and Johnson, Paoli and Wilkes on topics concerning faith, the soul, and death, he was not merely a celebrity-seeker but-for want of a better term-a truth-seeker. Zaretsky reveals a life more complex and compelling than suggested by the label "Johnson's biographer," and one that 250 years later registers our own variations of mind.

Set against the lush backdrop of rural El Salvador at the turn of the century, Claudia Lars' richly evocative memoir is a simple, yet profound tribute to the folklore, customs, and traditions of her people. It is a lyrical exaltation of her land's beauty, brimming with warm, vibrant imagery. Born to an Irish-American father and a Salvadoran mother, Lars takes readers on an enchanting journey that celebrates her dual heritage and reveals, with innocence and charm, the gradual self-awareness of a child who, from a very young age, was endowed with the soul of a poet.

"Land of Childhood" was first published in El Salvador in 1958. Currently in its seventeenth edition, it is an award-winning book that has become a beloved national classic as well as required reading for students in secondary schools and university classrooms.

There is a problem for the writer who decides to write his or her autobiography; and it is one that I have had to make a decision about. I know who I am when I am being myself in my day to day existence; I know who I am when I am writing and publishing my work. But who am I when the two collide? In fact, whose name will appear on the cover? Finally, I decided that I must emerge from my concealing curtain-my pen-name-and face the fact that Barbara Yates Rothwell could not have written this 'Fragment' without Hebe Morgan. So I am happy to combine my two lives for once, and let the reader in on the secret. I have been Hebe for 85 years; and I have been Barbara for about 50 of those years. The two of us get on quite well: Hebe makes the beds and the coffee while Barbara gets to the computer. Hebe was married for 59 years to Dr Derek Moore Morgan, and looked after the family; Barbara, meanwhile, managed to establish her writing career. Looking back, I think both of me were quite successful at what we took on You may wonder what the point is in having a pen-name. People have often asked me this, and some have thought it was not sensible to try to make a name for oneself as a writer by using another name. The reasons will be as many as the people who choose to do this. In my case, I found it released me from thinking too conventionally. As we now say, it permitted me to think 'outside the square'. Being a wife and mother is wonderful, but it can tend to make one think along very straight lines. A fiction writer needs to be able think freely, to analyse characters, to imagine lives that perhaps have nothing to do with the author's daily existence. I found it very helpful. However you think of me, whichever hat I wear for you, I hope you will enjoy journeying with me for a little while as I explore my own 'fragment of life'.

"Something will happen to me on Desolation Peak...I can feel it." In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked from Mill Valley, CA, to the North Cascades to spend two months serving as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service. Taking only the Diamond Sutra for reading material, he intended to spend his time in deep contemplation and to achieve enlightenment. He wrote in his journal that he planned "to concentrate on emptiness of self, other selves, living beings, and universal self." In letters to friends he proclaimed, "Something will happen to me on Desolation Peak...I can feel it." Kerouac's experience on Desolation Peak forms the climax of his novel The Dharma Bums and has also been depicted in part 1 of Desolation Angels and a chapter in his nonfiction book Lonesome Traveler. None of these versions offers a full, true picture, however; and for that reason, Desolation Peak is essential reading. What separates Kerouac from all other writers is the depth that he went in exploring his own consciousness, and what will prove his most enduring legacy is the record he left of that exploration, revealing the psyche of a sensitive, tortured artist grappling with himself in the mid-20th Century. The highlight of Desolation Peak is the journal he kept, starkly revealing the depth of his poverty, the extremity of his mood swings, and the ongoing arguments with himself over the future direction of his life, his writing, and faith. Along with the journal, he worked on a series of projects, including "Ozone Park," another installment of the Duluoz Legend beginning in 1943, after his discharge from the Navy; "The Martin Family," an intended sequel to The Town and the City, and "Desolation Adventure," a series of sketches that became part 1 of Desolation Angels,. In writing it, Kerouac was re-committing himself to his more experimental, then-unpublishable style, declaring in the journal that "the form of the future is no-form." Also included in Collected Writings is "The Diamondcutter of Perfect Knowing," Kerouac's "transliteration" of the Diamond Sutra, his "Desolation Blues" and "Desolation Pops" poems, and assorted prose sketches and dreams.

William Wordsworth: Interviews and Recollections collects and reprints, on a generous scale, selections from the texts of both immediately recorded opinions and characterizations that were written down in later years. Represented in this anthology are 22 of Wordsworth's most important contemporaries. With the exception of Shelley, they all knew Wordsworth personally. It was difficult, and perhaps impossible, for any of them to write neutrally or objectively about the impression that Wordsworth made on them. Their comments make for lively reading.

Newly revised and enlarged, the second edition of A Conrad Chronology draws upon a rich range of published and unpublished materials. It offers a detailed factual record of Joseph Conrad's unfolding life as seaman and writer as well as tracing the compositional and publication history of his major works.

'If you want to read a book that moves you both at the level of sentence and the quality of language and with the emotional depth of its subject matter, then A Fortunate Woman is definitely the book you should be reading' Samanth Subramanian, Baillie Gifford Judge When Polly Morland is clearing out her mother's house she finds a book that will lead her to a remarkable figure living on her own doorstep: the country doctor who works in the same remote, wooded valley she has lived in for many years. This doctor is a rarity in contemporary medicine, she knows her patients inside out, and their stories are deeply entwined with her own. In A Fortunate Woman, with its beautiful photographs by Richard Baker, Polly Morland has written a profoundly moving love letter to a landscape, a community and, above all, to what it means to be a good doctor. 'Morland writes about nature and the changing landscape with such lyrical precision that her prose sometimes seems close to poetry' Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times 'Timely . . . compelling . . . a delicately drawn miniature' The Financial Times 'This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape' Kathleen Jamie, The New Statesman

'Sympathetic and wonderfully perceptive . . . a heartbreaking read' NICK COHEN, Critic 'Wise, witty and empathetic . . . outstanding' JIM CRACE 'A fascinating treatment of the age-old problem of writers and drink which displays the same subtle qualities as William Palmer's own undervalued novels' D. J. TAYLOR An 'enjoyable exploration of an enduringly fascinating subject . . . [Palmer] is above all a dispassionate critic, and is always attentive to, and unwaveringly perceptive about the art of his subjects as well as their relationship with alcohol . . . [his] treatment is even-handed and largely without judgement. He tries to understand, without either condoning or censuring, the impulses behind often reprehensible behaviour' SOUMYA BHATTACHARYA, New Statesman 'A vastly absorbing and entertaining study of this ever-interesting subject' ANDREW DAVIES, screenwriter and novelist 'In Love with Hell is a fascinating and beautifully written account of the lives of eleven British and American authors whose addiction to alcohol may have been a necessary adjunct to their writing but ruined their lives. Palmer's succinct biographies contain fine descriptions of the writers, their work and the times they lived in; and there are convincing insights into what led so many authors to take to drink.' PIERS PAUL READ Why do some writers destroy themselves by drinking alcohol? Before our health-conscious age it would be true to say that many writers drank what we now regard as excessive amounts. Graham Greene, for instance, drank on a daily basis quantities of spirits and wine and beer most doctors would consider as being dangerous to his health. But he was rarely out of control and lived with his considerable wits intact to the age of eighty-six. W. H. Auden drank the most of a bottle of spirits a day, but also worked hard and steadily every day until his death. Even T. S. Eliot, for all his pontifical demeanour, was extremely fond of gin and was once observed completely drunk on a London Tube station by a startled friend. These were not writers who are generally regarded as alcoholics. 'Alcoholic' is, in any case, a slippery word, as exemplified by Dylan Thomas's definition of an alcoholic as 'someone you dislike who drinks as much as you.' The word is still controversial and often misunderstood and misapplied. What acclaimed novelist and poet William Palmer's book is interested in is the effect that heavy drinking had on writers, how they lived with it and were sometimes destroyed by it, and how they described the whole private and social world of the drinker in their work. He looks at Patrick Hamilton ('the feverish magic that alcohol can work'); Jean Rhys ('As soon as I sober up I start again'); Charles Jackson ('Delirium is a disease of the night'); Malcolm Lowry ('I love hell. I can't wait to go back there'); Dylan Thomas ('A womb with a view'); John Cheever ('The singing of the bottles in the pantry'); Flann O'Brien ('A pint of plain is your only man'); Anthony Burgess ('Writing is an agony mitigated by drink'); Kingsley Amis ('Beer makes you drunk'); Richard Yates ('The road to Revolutionary Road'); and Elizabeth Bishop ('The writer's writer's writer').

This largely chronological study of Iris Murdoch's literary life begins with her fledgling publications at Badminton School and Oxford, and her Irish heritage. It moves through the novels of the next four decades and concludes with an account of the biographical, critical and media attention given to her life and work since her death in 1999.

This first full-length biography of the Nobel Laureate to appear in a quarter century explores John Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. His most poignant and evocative writing emerged in his sympathy for the Okies fleeing the dust storms of the Midwest, the migrant workers toiling in California's fields and the labourers on Cannery Row, reflecting a social engagement-paradoxical for all of his natural misanthropy-radically different from the writers of the so-called Lost Generation. A man by turns quick-tempered, contrary, compassionate and ultimately brilliant, Steinbeck took aim at the corrosiveness of power, the perils of income inequality and the growing urgency of ecological collapse, all of which drive fierce public debate to this day.

This work offers a peer reviewed account of Defoe's birth and upbringing from 1644 and how he kept the first 36 years of his life a secret and discusses the effects of a vastly different life on all critical understandings of his writing. It is fundamental to any study of Daniel Defoe.