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'An absolute belter of a biography' MARINA HYDE A Times Literary
Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022 An LA Times Best Book of the Year
2022 An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean
Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea. An obsessive and
troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and
unnerving writers of the twentieth century. Memories of a
conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys
wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and
later in England. Rhys's experiences of heartbreak, poverty,
notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for
her writing, forming an iconic 'Rhys woman' whose personality -
vulnerable, witty, watchful and angry - was often mistaken, and
still is, for a self-portrait. Many details of Rhys's life emerge
from her memoir, Smile Please and the stories she wrote throughout
her long and challenging career. But it's a shock to discover that
no biographer - until now - has researched the crucial seventeen
years that Rhys spent living on the remote Caribbean island of
Dominica; the island which haunted Rhys's mind and her work for the
rest of her life. Luminous and penetrating, Seymour's biography
reveals a proud and fiercely independent artist, one who
experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug
dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil - and yet was never a
victim. I Used to Live Here Once enables one of our most excitingly
intuitive biographers to uncover the hidden truth about a
fascinatingly elusive woman. The figure who emerges for Seymour is
powerful, cultured, self-mocking, self-absorbed, unpredictable and
often darkly funny. Persuasive, surprising and compassionate, this
unforgettable biography brings Jean Rhys to life as never before.
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Mary Shelley (Paperback)
Miranda Seymour
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R487
R335
Discovery Miles 3 350
Save R152 (31%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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'The most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way
for a decade...' - Financial Times 'To be savoured for its vivid
and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times
of the gifted Mary Shelley' - Times Literary Supplement 'Brilliant
and enthralling' - Independent On Sunday 'Wonderfully vivid' -
Spectator The definitive and richly woven biography of Mary
Shelley, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein
The creator of the world's most famous outsider became one herself
. . . There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the
stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori
and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From
that emerged Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations
for two hundred years. Miranda Seymour illustrates the rich and
unexplored life of Mary Shelley. Everything from her childhood to
her tempestuous relationship with Percy Shelley; Seymour brings to
life the brilliant mind that created Frankenstein through
unexplored and intriguing sources. The Mary Shelley we meet here is
a woman we can engage with and understand. Her world, so rich in
its settings and its cast of characters, seems drawn from a novel.
She, at its centre, is flawed, brave, generous, and impetuous, a
woman whose dark and brilliant imagination gave us a myth which
seems ever more potent in our own era.
A Sunday Times Book of the Year Shortlisted for The Pol Roger Duff
Cooper Prize 'This magnificent, highly readable double
biography...brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to
life' The Financial Times 'A gripping saga of a double-biography'
Daily Mail 'A masterful portrait' The Times 'Vastly enjoyable'
Literary Review 'Deeply absorbing and meticulously researched' The
Oldie In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke
married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year
later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future
Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a
revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his
wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a
poet. Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most
progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was
introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits.
Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined
that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary
imagination. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a
steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant and boldly
unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of
Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict, as nobody
would do for another century, the dawn today of our modern computer
age. When Ada died - like her father, she was only 36 - great
things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate
astronomer. Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by
cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with
light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars. Drawing
on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which
Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and
reputations both of his wife and his daughter. During her life,
Lady Byron was praised as a paragon of virtue; within ten years of
her death, she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a
hundred years later, Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a
prudish wife and cruelly controlling mother. But her hidden
devotion to Byron and her tender ambitions for his mercurial,
brilliant daughter reveal a deeply complex but unsuspectedly
sympathetic personality. Miranda Seymour has written a masterful
portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives
were often governed and always haunted by the dangerously
enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom
Ada never knew.
'An absolute belter of a biography' MARINA HYDE A Times Literary
Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022 An LA Times Best Book of the Year
2022 An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean
Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea. An obsessive and
troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and
unnerving writers of the twentieth century. Memories of a
conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys
wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and
later in England. Rhys's experiences of heartbreak, poverty,
notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for
her writing, forming an iconic 'Rhys woman' whose personality -
vulnerable, witty, watchful and angry - was often mistaken, and
still is, for a self-portrait. Many details of Rhys's life emerge
from her memoir, Smile Please and the stories she wrote throughout
her long and challenging career. But it's a shock to discover that
no biographer - until now - has researched the crucial seventeen
years that Rhys spent living on the remote Caribbean island of
Dominica; the island which haunted Rhys's mind and her work for the
rest of her life. Luminous and penetrating, Seymour's biography
reveals a proud and fiercely independent artist, one who
experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug
dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil - and yet was never a
victim. I Used to Live Here Once enables one of our most excitingly
intuitive biographers to uncover the hidden truth about a
fascinatingly elusive woman. The figure who emerges for Seymour is
powerful, cultured, self-mocking, self-absorbed, unpredictable and
often darkly funny. Persuasive, surprising and compassionate, this
unforgettable biography brings Jean Rhys to life as never before.
Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth
century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short
and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her
extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in
England, a body of fiction—above all, the extraordinary Wide
Sargasso Sea—that has a passionate following today. And yet her
own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean
island of Dominica, remains too little explored, until now. In I
Used to Live Here Once, Miranda Seymour sheds new light on the
artist whose proud and fiercely solitary life profoundly informed
her writing. Rhys experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol
and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil, all of which
contributed to the “Rhys woman” of her oeuvre. Today, readers
still intuitively relate to her unforgettable characters,
vulnerable, watchful, and often alarmingly disaster-prone
outsiders; women with a different way of moving through the world.
And yet, while her works often contain autobiographical material,
Rhys herself was never a victim. The figure who emerges for Seymour
is cultured, self-mocking, unpredictable—and shockingly
contemporary. Based on new research in the Caribbean, a wealth of
never-before-seen papers, journals, letters, and photographs, and
interviews with those who knew Rhys, I Used to Live Here Once is a
luminous and penetrating portrait of a fascinatingly elusive
artist.
Henry James left London in 1897 to spend the last two decades of
his life in East Sussex where his neighbours included H. G. Wells,
Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad. In this widely
admired study Miranda Seymour aims to cut through 'the mass of
evasions ...and misrepresentations' about their relationships with
James. She finds that James was cruelly patronizing to protege
Wells and to Conrad; that he was annoyed by Ford, an incorrigible
romancer; that he envied his rich friend Edith Wharton for her wide
readership; that he snubbed Cora Taylor, Crane's lover, after she
fled America when her railway-conductor husband was found guilty of
murder. Seymour, a descendant of James's close friend, the novelist
Howard Sturgis, records how James's critiques of fellow writers
often amounted to annihilation and she chronicles his infatuations
with handsome young men, including sculptor Hendrik Andersen and
poet Rupert Brooke. In this erudite and insightful book that draws
on letters and published works, Miranda Seymour vividly recreates
the uneasy alliance of writers and personalities in this 'Rye
Mafia'.
Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale by Miranda Seymour. 'A
seductive model of elegant scholarship.' Sue Gaisford, Independent
'A kind of blissography, teeming with bon mots.' Jilly Cooper,
Sunday Times (Books of the Year) 'A sympathetic and surely
definitive account, adding greatly to our knowledge of the people
and the period.' Claire Tomalin, Independent on Sunday This
biography reveals Ottoline Morrell, London's leading literary
hostess during the first three decades of the 20th century.
Augustus John, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Virginia
Woolf and W.B. Yeats enjoyed her hospitality and she was Bertrand
Russell's mistress for many years. To some she was a lover, to
others a confidante and adviser. To many she was a mother
substitute. A half-sister of the Duke of Portland and wife to a
Liberal MP, she ran a celebrated salon before the First World War,
swiftly emerging as a personality in her own right. Her influence
was enormous: Huxley was one of many young writers who described
her as having given him 'a complete mental re-orientation.' Miranda
Seymour is the only Bloomsbury biographer to be allowed access to
family papers which include Morrell's lost correspondence with
Lytton Strachey and the revealing private records she kept from
1902 (the year of her marriage) to her death in 1938. This is also
the first life of Morrell to have full benefit of Bertrand
Russell's 2,500 letters to her. Fresh and often startling light is
thrown not only on her passionate relationship with Russell and on
her curious marriage to Philip Morrell, which survived against all
odds, but also on the Bloomsberries, their snobbery, their malice
and their deceit.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Washington Post
Best Book of 2001, Mary Shelley has been called a harrowing life,
wonderfully retold (The Washington Post). This splendid biography
(The New Yorker) gracefully moves through the dramatic life of the
woman behind history's most legendary monster. A daughter of Mary
Wollstonecraft, author of the daring A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, and the radical philosopher William Godwin, Mary Shelley
grew up amid the literary and political avant-garde of
early-nineteenth-century London. She escaped to Europe at seventeen
with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, causing a great
scandal. On a famous night of eerie thunderstorms, in a villa near
Lord Byron's on Lake Geneva, they told ghost stories and tales of
horror, giving birth to the idea of Frankenstein, a monster who has
haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years. The Mary we meet
here, brilliantly brought to life by Seymour from previously
unexplored sources, is brave, generous, and impetuous. Struck by
tragedy, she lost three of her four children, and when she was only
twenty-four, Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy. As Henry
Carrigan of Library Journal said, this is one of the finest and
most significant literary biographies of recent years. Miranda
Seymour's biography of Mary Shelley provides a thoughtfully
considered, lifelike portrait of a complex, often misunderstood
character. -- Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times [Miranda Seymour] has
vivid narrative gifts and a perceptive understanding of the main
personalities. -- Claude Rawson, The New York Times Book Review
Mary Shelley is the most dazzling biography of a female writer to
have come my way for a decade. -- Jackie Wullschlager, Financial
Times
In 1815, the clever, courted, and cherished Annabella Milbanke
married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year
later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future
Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a
revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his
wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a
poet. Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most
progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was
introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits.
Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined
that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary
imagination. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a
steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant and boldly
unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of
Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict-as nobody
would do for another century-the dawn of the modern computer age.
When Ada died-like her father, she was only 36-great things seemed
still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. Even while
mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was
frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with light refraction
to explore the analysis of distant stars. Drawing on fascinating
new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after
his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations both of his
wife and his daughter. During her life, Lady Byron was praised as a
paragon of virtue; within ten years of her death, she was vilified
as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a hundred years later,
Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a prudish wife and cruelly
controlling mother. But her hidden devotion to Byron and her tender
ambitions for his mercurial, brilliant daughter reveal a deeply
complex but unexpectedly sympathetic personality. Miranda Seymour
has written a masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing
how two turbulent lives were often governed and always haunted by
the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that
extraordinary father whom Ada never knew.
THE BUGATTI QUEEN is the beautifully illustrated story of an
indomitable and fascinating woman, a pioneer of motorsport who
revelled in danger. Born in 1900 in a tiny French village, Helene
Delangle, aka Helle Nice, became a dancer and a stripper before
catching the eye of Ettore Bugatti. Seduced by the combination of
machines and speed, Helle Nice went on to have an unprecedented
career, competing in numerous Grands Prix and becoming the only
woman to drive on the treacherous American speedbowls in the 1930s.
She set new land-speed records before a notorious accident which
almost ended her racing days. Re-creating her rollercoaster career
with authority and panache from many previously unpublished
sources, Miranda Seymour reveals the story of an unforgettable life
and sheds new light on the extraordinary and reckless world of
motor-racing between the wars.
A biography and family memoir by turns hilarious and
heart-wrenching, Miranda Seymour's Thrumpton Hall is a riveting,
frequently shocking, and ultimately unforgettable true story of the
devastating consequences of obsessive desire and misplaced
love."Dear Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight." When
twenty-one-year-old George Seymour wrote these words in 1944, the
object of his affection was not a young woman but the beautiful
country house in Nottinghamshire that he desired above all else.
Miranda Seymour would later be raised at Thrumpton Hall--her
upbringing far from idyllic, as life revolved around her father's
odd capriciousness. The house took priority over everything, even
his family--until the day when George Seymour, in his golden years,
began dressing in black leather and riding powerful motorbikes
around the countryside in the company of surprising friends.For
fans of Downton Abbey--the show's creator, Julian Fellowes, called
it "brilliant, original, and intensely readable"--Thrumpton Hall is
a poignant and memorable true story of family.
Martin Lynch-Gibbon believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover.But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional re-education. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendour at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, 'this is nothing to do with happiness'.
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