George Eliot: The Last Victorian
10 best books like George Eliot: The Last Victorian (Kathryn Hughes): Victorian People and Ideas, A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin, Journals and Letters, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Dickens, Byron: Life and Legend, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster, Louisa May Alcott, Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives Of The Pre Raphaelites, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories
The reputation of the Victorian age in England has undergone many vicissitudes, but it is now higher than ever. In this important study, Richard D. Altick moves us toward an understanding of the social, intellectual, and theological crises that Carlyle and Dickens, Tennyson and Arnold were daily...
| Author | Judith Flanders |
| ISBN | 0393052109 |
THE MACDONALD SISTERS--Alice, Georgiana, Agnes, and Louisa--started life in the teeming ranks of the lower-middle classes, denied the advantages of education and the expectation of social advancement. Yet as wives and mothers they would connect a famous painter, a president of the Royal Academy,...
| Author | Fanny Burney |
| ISBN | 0140436243 |
Novelist and playwright Frances (Fanny) Burney, 1752-1840, was also a prolific writer of journals and letters, beginning with the diary she started at fifteen and continuing until the end of her eventful life. From her youth in London high society to a period in the court of Queen Charlotte and her years...
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 | 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 | Fiona MacCarthy |
| ISBN | 0571179975 |
An excellent biography of Byron - and I've read a few by now. To be honest, during Byron's early years I was feeling as if I'd read it all (or most of it) before. But during the later years, especially once he reaches Venice, the book really came into its own. I felt there was more depth, detail and interest...
| 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....
Louisa May Alcott never intended to write "Little Women." She had dismissed her publisher's pleas for such a novel. Written out of necessity to support her family, the book had an astounding success that changed her life, a life which turned out very differently from that of her beloved heroine Jo March....
| 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...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | Dorothy Wordsworth |
| ISBN | 0192840622 |
Dorothy Wordsworth's journals are a unique record of her life with her brother William, at the time when he was at the height of his poetic powers. Invaluable for the insight they give into the daily life of the poet and his friendship with Coleridge, they are also remarkable for their spontaneity and...
| Author | Lyndall Gordon |
| ISBN | 0393314480 |
This critically acclaimed portrait of Charlotte Brontë looks beyond the insistent image of the modest Victorian lady, the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones, to reveal a strong, fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art. Drawing on Brontë's unpublished letters, journals,...
| Author | Irene Howat |
| ISBN | 1857928377 |
These Christian women were once little girls playing with dolls, making mistakes and growing up in quite a different world. But was it that different? Irene Howat has researched the lives of these famous women of God and draws out lessons we can all relate to, especially youngsters today. Featuring...
Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West
| Author | Victoria Glendinning |
The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her passionate affair with the novelist...
| Author | Mark Bostridge |
| ISBN | 0374156654 |
The common soldier’s savior, the standard-bearer of modern nursing, a pioneering social reformer: Florence Nightingale belongs to that select band of historical characters who are instantly recognizable. Home-schooled, bound for the life of an educated Victorian lady, Nightingale scandalized...
| Author | Gillian Gill |
| ISBN | 0345451880 |
Florence Nightingale was for a time the most famous woman in Britain–if not the world. We know her today primarily as a saintly character, perhaps as a heroic reformer of Britain’s health-care system. The reality is more involved and far more fascinating. In an utterly beguiling narrative that...
| Author | Robert Gottlieb |
| ISBN | 0300141270 |
From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a riveting portrait of the great Sarah Bernhardt from acclaimed writer Robert Gottlieb
Everything about Sarah Bernhardt is fascinating, from her obscure birth to her glorious career—redefining the very nature of her art—to her amazing (and...
| Author | Alison Light |
| ISBN | 1596915609 |
A revealing and personal new perspective on the Bloomsbury set and the servants who shared their lives.
When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own in 1929, she established her reputation as a feminist, a woman who could imagine a more open and liberal reality, and an advocate for the female...
