Charles Dickens
10 best books like Charles Dickens (Jane Smiley): Life of Charles Dickens, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Saint Augustine, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist
| Author | John Forster |
| ISBN | 9077932038 |
John Forster (1812-1876), English biographer and critic, best known for his excellent Life of Charles Dickens. Forster met Dickens in 1836, and became his close friend and adviser. Dickens modeled Our Mutual Friend character John Podsnap on Forster, and his rooms are said to be the basis for the residence...
| Author | Susan Cheever |
| ISBN | 0743264614 |
Even the most devoted readers of nineteenth-century American literature often assume that the men and women behind the masterpieces were as dull and staid as the era's static daguerreotypes. Susan Cheever's latest work, however, brings new life to the well-known literary personages who produced...
| Author | Peter Ackroyd |
| ISBN | 0099437090 |
Dickens was a landmark biography when first published in 1990. This specially edited shorter edition takes the reader into the life of one of the world's greatest writers.
Here, Ackroyd attempts to peel away the mask of a man whose life was outwardly a picture of Victorian rectitude, but whose...
| Author | Claire Tomalin |
| ISBN | 1594201188 |
The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of...
| Author | Brenda Wineapple |
| ISBN | 1400044014 |
After p. 125
'Tis a puzzlement - this Book -
'Tis - or 'twas -
Or -
Perhaps a bit of both -
At End
I must add this title to the short list of biographical narratives that I consider perfect (not that my selection bears any significance beyond the edge of my desk), in the...
| Author | Garry Wills |
| ISBN | 0143035983 |
Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills brings the same fresh scholarship, lively prose, and critical appreciation that characterize his well-known books on religion and American history to this outstanding biography of one of the most influential Christian philosophers.Saint Augustine follows...
| Author | Kathryn Hughes |
| ISBN | 0815411219 |
Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot (1819-1880) achieved lasting renown with the novels Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede. Her masterworks were written after years of living an unconventional life, including a scandalous voyage to Europe with the married writer and editor George Henry Lewes....
| Author | Edna O'Brien |
| ISBN | 2762123216 |
Although Edna O'Brien has never trafficked in James Joyce's head-over-heels brand of high modernism, she does have a couple of characteristics in common with her great predecessor. After all, both authors engaged in a profoundly ambivalent excoriation of their native Ireland. And while O'Brien's...
| Author | Nigel Nicolson |
| ISBN | 0670894435 |
Virginia Woolf's life as part of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group has captured the imagination of millions. Now Nigel Nicolson, the distinguished son of British writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West -- one of Woolf's closest friends and sometime lover -- threads his personal reminiscences...
| Author | Robert Douglas-Fairhurst |
| ISBN | 0674050037 |
"Becoming Dickens" tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England's greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens's early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the...
| 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...
Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Novelists
It was the Best of Times, it was the Worst of Times, but most of all, as Daniel Pool reveals in this delightful new book, it was a time of surprisingly outrageous behavior. Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters plunks the reader down in the middle of the London book world to expose the madcap...
Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
| Author | G.K. Chesterton |
| ISBN | 1417919965 |
Not really a Critical Study, as originally subtitled, Chesterton’s Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men is instead a breezy, piquant, thoroughly personal account of the delights of Dickens. It’s the alluring kind of introduction one always needs, for that author towards whom one is well...
| Author | Gordon Bowker |
| ISBN | 0297848038 |
Gordon Bowker's biography incorporates recently unearthed material, of interest to the hardcore Joycean. It includes the palaver surrounding Joyce's 1931 marriage ceremony to Nora Barnacle and his rejection of an Irish passport underscoring his ambivalence towards his homeland. Bowker is concerned...
| Author | Adam Thirlwell |
| ISBN | 0374137226 |
Having slept with a prostitute in Egypt, a young French novelist named Gustave Flaubert at last abandons sentimentality and begins to write. He influences the obscure French writer Édouard Dujardin, who is read by James Joyce on the train to Trieste, where he will teach English to the Italian novelist...
| Author | R.W.B. Lewis |
| ISBN | 0670899097 |
Only R.W.B. Lewis-the renowned biographer and author of The City of Florence-could write so insightfully about Dante Alighieri, Florence's famous son. In Dante he traces the life and complex development-emotional, artistic, philosophical-of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings...
A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families
| Author | Michael Holroyd |
| ISBN | 0701179872 |
An epic yet intimate portrait of two theatrical dynasties, which takes us from the Victorian stage to the modern age.
Ellen Terry was a natural actress who filled the theatre with a magical radiance. The Times called her the “uncrowned queen of England,” but behind her public success lay...
| Author | Lucasta Miller |
| ISBN | 1400078350 |
Following the Brontë sisters through their many reincarnations at the hands of biographers, Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontës themselves. Their first biographer, Mrs Gaskell, transformed their story of literary ambition into one...
| Author | Leon Edel |
| ISBN | 0006548687 |
This is the one-volume edition of a famous biography of Henry James, which includes new material. Born in America, Henry James was educated both there and in Europe before settling in London, where he was to spend most of his life, in 1876. His novels represent the culmination of the 19th-century realist...
Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
| Author | Nancy Armstrong |
| ISBN | 0195061608 |
Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic...
