Biography: literary
Showing all 8 results
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Charlotte Mew
£25.00Charlotte Mew
The British poet Charlotte Mew – whose 150th anniversary falls in 2019 – was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again. This is a comprehensive biography, from cradle to grave, and it is written by Faber poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew’s childhood house in Doughty Street. Mew was a curious mix of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and seclusion: they reveal the private agony of an isolated being who was forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while being at the same time propelled by her work into the public arena.
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Jane Austen
£20.00Jane Austen
This book traces the author’s life and times, her personal relationships, the attitudes and customs of the time that shaped her and were in turn shaped by her work, and the places where she lived, worked and set her novels.
£20.00 -
Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister
£15.99Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister
A revealing account of a naval officer’s young wife, her life during the Napoleonic Wars, and her influence on Jane Austen’s fiction.£15.99 -
Keats
£17.99Keats
The epitaph John Keats wrote for his own gravestone – ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’ – seemingly damned him to oblivion. When he died at the age of twenty-five, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets two hundred years later, though he himself had an inkling. In this brief life, Lucasta Miller takes Keats’s best-known poems – the ones you are most likely to have read – and excavates their backstories. In doing so, she resurrects the real Keats: a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and dysfunctional family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; an atheist and a liberal at a time of repression; a human being who delighted in the sensation of the moment; but a complex individual, not the ethereal figure of his posthumous myth.
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Philip Roth
£30.00Philip Roth
Appointed by Philip Roth and granted complete access and independence, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth’s personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the post-war literary scene. Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain.
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The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym
£25.00The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym
‘Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously’ JILLY COOPER
Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer
A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021
£25.00 -
The Genius of Jane Austen
£9.99The Genius of Jane Austen
A radical look at Jane Austen as you’ve never seen her – as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. The Genius of Jane Austen celebrates Britain’s favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such awesome movies, time after time.
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The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien
£25.00The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien
An expertly written investigation of the places that shaped the work of one of the world’s best loved authors, exploring the relationship between worlds real and fantastical.
£25.00