Byron: Life and Legend
10 best books like Byron: Life and Legend (Fiona MacCarthy): Tolstoy: A Russian Life, E. M. Forster: A Life, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Keats, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers, Shelley: The Pursuit, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster, Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets: The Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, Nikolai Gogol
| Author | Rosamund Bartlett |
| ISBN | 1846681383 |
A hundred years ago in November 1910 Count Leo Tolstoy died on a remote Russian railway station, attended by the world's media, taken ill as he was finally attempting to escape his decadent (as he saw it), aristocratic family life.
Tolstoy has been universally recognised as a colossus of world...
| Author | P.N. Furbank |
| ISBN | 0156286513 |
I’ve owned this two-in-one volume for years and finally opened it after Jasmine's wonderful essay-review of Maurice had me thinking of Forster’s probable loneliness. Reading this made me feel better about that aspect of his life: yes, there was much (mostly physical) loneliness in his life,...
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
| Author | Claire Tomalin |
| ISBN | 0140167617 |
Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day.
She published "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement;...
| Author | Andrew Motion |
| ISBN | 0226542408 |
Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters,...
| Author | Virginia Spencer Carr |
| ISBN | 0820325228 |
The Lonely Hunter is widely accepted as the standard biography of Carson McCullers. Author of such landmarks of modern American fiction as Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers was the enfant terrible of the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Gifted but tormented,...
| Author | Richard Holmes |
| ISBN | 1590170377 |
Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and...
| Author | Wendy Moffat |
| ISBN | 0374166781 |
A REVELATORY LOOK AT THE INTIMATE LIFE OF THE GREAT AUTHOR—AND HOW IT SHAPED HIS MOST BE LOVED WORKS
With the posthumous publication of his long-suppressed novel Maurice in 1970, E. M. Forster came out as a homosexual— though that revelation made barely a ripple in his literary reputation....
| Author | Catherine M. Andronik |
| ISBN | 0805077839 |
Meet the rebellious young poets who brought about a literary revolution
Rock stars may think they invented sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but the Romantic poets truly created the mold.
In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through...
| Author | Carole Seymour-Jones |
| ISBN | 0385499930 |
This astonishing portrait of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of poet T.S. Eliot, gives a voice to the woman who, for seventeen years, had shared a unique literary partnership with Eliot but who was scapegoated for the failure of the marriage and all but obliterated from historical record. In so doing, Painted...
| Author | Vladimir Nabokov |
| ISBN | 0811201201 |
The work of Gogol—one of the very greatest of Russia's literary geniuses—has become fairly well known in America but has seldom been properly understood. There have been many bad, but a few good, translations of his work available in English, and critics have often tended to put labels on him, to...
| Author | Benita Eisler |
| ISBN | 0679740856 |
In this masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity, noted biographer Benita Eisler offers a fuller and more complex vision than we have yet been afforded of George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Eisler reexamines his poetic achievement in the context...
| Author | Doris Langley Moore |
| ISBN | 1935554484 |
“The best biography of Lord Byron ever written,” according to Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin, is now back in print after decades.
Of the hundreds of books on Byron and his work, not one has been devoted to the immediate aftermath of his life; and yet it is these first twenty posthumous years that...
| Author | Daisy Hay |
| ISBN | 0374123756 |
Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspective—celebrating their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism.
The book focuses on the...
| Author | Franny Moyle |
| ISBN | 0719521904 |
Desperate Romantics, a tie-in with a new BBC series, focuses on the scandals, rather than on the group’s ideas, social experiments or artistic development: Ruskin’s loveless marriage and critical championing of Millais, who then went off with Effie Ruskin, Rossetti’s various loves, above...
This is a biography of one of my favourite writers, written by another of my favourite writers. That said, I enjoyed it but was left a bit unsatisfied, feeling that we never quite get inside Mary's heart and mind. And maybe that's okay because maybe it's none of our business, really, but as she is dead and...
The six literary wives in the book, Anna Dostoevsky, Sophia Tolstoy, Véra Nabokov, Elena Bulgakov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn were muses, intellectual companions, and indispensable aids to Russia’s most celebrated writers. Popoff draws from the women’s autobiographical...
| Author | Jenny Uglow |
| ISBN | 0374147515 |
Winner of the Portico Prize
Shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography of the Year High-spirited, witty and passionate, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian age, including Mary Barton, North and South and Wives and Daughters. This biography traces Elizabeth's...
| Author | Alfred Habegger |
| ISBN | 0812966015 |
Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography,...
| Author | Michael Slater |
| ISBN | 0300112076 |
This long-awaited biography, twenty years after the last major account, uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Drawing on a lifetime’s study of this prodigiously brilliant figure, Michael Slater explores the personal and emotional life, the high-profile public...
| Author | Miranda Seymour |
| ISBN | 0802117023 |
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...
| Author | Edna O'Brien |
| ISBN | 0297855530 |
byron is just not that into you. it doesnt matter what you do - hes just not that into you. he might put his baby in you, but he will leave you as soon as you start going into labor and return later only to shoot bottles in your living room while you strain and bleed to produce a creature he will hardly look at. because...
Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
| Author | Lyndall Gordon |
| ISBN | 0060957743 |
The founder of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the most famous woman of her era. A brilliant, unconventional rebel vilified for her strikingly modern notions of education, family, work, and personal relationships, she nevertheless strongly influenced political philosophy...
