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"Biographers Great Britain Biography."
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Winifred Gerin
The biographer Winifred Gerin (1901-81), who wrote the lives of all four Bronte siblings, stumbled on her literary vocation on a visit to Haworth, after a difficult decade following the death of her first husband. On the same visit she met her second husband, a Bronte enthusiast twenty years her junior. Together they turned their backs on London to live within sight of the Parsonage, Gerin believing that full understanding of the Brontes required total immersion in their environment. Gerin's childhood and youth, like the Brontes', was characterised by a cultured home and intense imaginative life shared with her sister and two brothers, and by family tragedies (the loss of two siblings in early life). Strong cultural influences formed the children's imagination: polyglot parents, French history, the Crystal Palace, Old Vic productions. Winifred's years at Newnham College, Cambridge were enlivened by eccentric characters such as the legendary lecturer Quiller-Couch (Q'), Lytton Strachey's sister Pernel and Bloomsbury's favourite philosopher, G.E. Moore. Her happy life in Paris with her Belgian cellist husband, Eugene Gerin, was brought to an abrupt end by the Second World War, in which the couple had many adventures: fleeing occupied Belgium, saving Jews in Nice in Vichy France, escaping through Spain and Portugal to England, where they did secret war work for Political Intelligence near Bletchley. After Eugene's death in 1945 Winifred coped with bereavement through poetry and playwriting until discovering her true literary metier on the trip to Haworth. She also wrote about Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Fanny Burney. The book is based on her letters and on her unpublished memoir.
eBook
This long pursuit : reflections of a romantic biographer
In this chronicle of his lifelong obsession with discovering, assembling, and re-creating the lives of writers and scientists, Richard Holmes here casts a new eye not only on the Romantic poets and lost women of Romantic science he has long studied, including Margaret Cavendish and Mary Somerville, but on their biographers, as well. He examines the evolution of the myths that have overshadowed certain lives (Percy Shelley's death at sea, Mary Wollstonecraft's paramours, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium-fueled lectures), and reveals how the manner in which each generation tells the stories of the lives that came before it shapes and is shaped by a contemporary understanding of human nature. These colorful portraits are deftly woven together with Holmes's own experience as a biographer, giving us the rare privilege of observing a master at work. An altogether spellbinding examination of the nature of biographical knowledge, brimming with the infectious curiosity that has characterized all of Holmes's acclaimed books.
Book
Liberal Mind of John Morley
No detailed description available for \"Liberal Mind of John Morley\".
eBook
Telling tales : the fabulous lives of Anita Leslie
Anita Leslie (1914-85), best known for popular biographies of her relatives including Jennie Churchill, Winston's mother, was also an unlikely war heroine. In 1940, Anita volunteered as an ambulance driver. By the end of the war, she was the only woman to have been awarded both the Africa Star and the Croix de Guerre, alongside the other medals for her service across all four fronts of WWII, as recounted in her remarkable memoir Train to Nowhere. In this revealing biography, Penny Perrick brings Anita to life- her complicated early years, her love for her children, her passion for Ireland, her career as a writer, and the ongoing family drama about Castle Leslie. Telling Tales is a scintillating and poignant account of this flamboyant woman.
Book
Stephen Spender
\"John Sutherland has written a superlative biography. He has combined tact with a straightforwardness like Spender's own. His study also challenges the misconceptions that have surrounded Spender since the 1960s. Sutherland emphasizes that he was not like the other poets of his time with whom he is so often grouped. Spender is--and I think will remain--very much his own man and his own poet.\"--John Bayley, New Statesman \"Masterly... Vibrant, humane, anecdote-packed.\"--John Carey, Sunday Times (London).
eBook
Biography and Gossip
With particular reference to Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and Brenda Maddox's The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence, goes back to the origins of evidence used by the biographers as the basis of some key interpretations, and by expanding on it, suggests that the use made of the material has been determined by the need to produce a readable narrative as much as concern for the truth.
Journal Article
Johnsonian Biography and the Swiftian Self
The history of the reception of Johnson's Life of Swift is one of readerly embarrassment and scholarly vexation. Basic questions of motivation have been overlooked. Argues that Johnson regards Swift as something simultaneously abhorrent and compelling, that his opposition to Swift is threatened by his sense of their philosophical similarity. By asking how identity, intimacy and disclosure are handled in Swiftian texts, describes the Life as Johnson's riposte, as the scene of collision between Swift's metamorphic self fashionings and Johnson's cherished, normative biographical impulses, between their cynically meaningless and anxiously meaningful worlds.
Journal Article
On the Authorship of the \Memoirs\ of Samuel Richardson in the \Universal Magazine\ (1786)
Clues as to the probable author of the \"Memoirs\" of Samuel Richardson are examined. The \"Memoirs\" can be tentatively ascribed to Richard Lobb.
Journal Article
