Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens
10 best books like Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens (Robert Gottlieb): George Eliot, A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin, Journals and Letters, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, The Invisible Woman, Byron: Life and Legend, Cairo: The City Victorious, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City, Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets: The Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
| Author | Jenny Uglow |
| ISBN | 1844084981 |
Best known for her masterpieces Middlemarch and Silas Marner, George Eliot (1819–1880) was both one of the most brilliant writers of her day, and one of the most talked about. Intellectual and independent, she had the strength to defy polite society with her highly unorthodox private life which...
| 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...
| Author | Claudia Roth Pierpont |
| ISBN | 0679751130 |
With a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives, Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century, women who remade themselves and the world through...
| Author | Claire Tomalin |
| ISBN | 0804172129 |
Now a major motion picture directed by Ralph Fiennes, co-starring Fiennes and Felicity Jones with Michelle Fairley, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Tom Hollander: the unforgettable story of Charles Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan, and of the secret relationship that linked them.
When Charles...
| 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 | Max Rodenbeck |
| ISBN | 0679767274 |
From a noted journalist who has spent much of his life in Cairo, here is a dazzling cultural excavation of that most ancient, colorful, and multifaceted of cities. The seat of pharaohs and sultans, the prize of conquerors from Alexander to Saladin to Napoleon, Cairo--nicknamed "the Victorious"--has...
| Author | Anna Quindlen |
| ISBN | 0792242076 |
Anna Quindlen first visited London from a chair in her suburban Philadelphia home--in one of her beloved childhood mystery novels. She has been back to London countless times since, through the pages of books and in person, and now, in Imagined London, she takes her own readers on a tour of this greatest...
| 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 | Michael Gorra |
| ISBN | 0871404087 |
Henry James (1843 1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James 's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady...
| Author | Robert Roper |
| ISBN | 0802715532 |
Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War
viii, 421 pp. 8vo. The Civil War is seen anew, and a great American family brought to life, in Robert Roper's brilliant evocation of the Family Whitman. Walt Whitman's work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound...
| Author | Alexandra Harris |
| ISBN | 0500251711 |
In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops.Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately,
wittily,...
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...
In her lifetime it was widely said that there were three political powers in Europe—Britain, Russia, and Madame de Stäel. Byron described her as "the first female writer of this, perhaps of any age," Germaine de Stäel was certainly the most remarkable woman of her time and she remains unique—both...
| 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 | John Dickson Carr |
| ISBN | 0786712341 |
This vivid biography, written by John Dickson Carr, a giant in the field of mystery fiction, benefits from his full access to the archives of the eminent Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—to his notebooks, diaries, press clippings, and voluminous correspondence. Like his creation Sherlock Holmes, Doyle...
| 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 | 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 | John Aubrey |
| ISBN | 0140435891 |
Compiled as material for Anthony Wood's histories of Oxford University, this text contributes to the oral history of Elizabethan and Stuart England. It parades statesmen, poets, philosopers and scientists, Raleigh and Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, and Boyle and Halley. They, together with less...
| Author | Juliet Gardiner |
| ISBN | 0755310284 |
Juliet Gardiner's critically acclaimed book - the first in a generation to tell the people's story of the Second World War - offers a compelling and comprehensive account of the pervasiveness of war on the Home Front. The book has been commended for its inclusion of many under-described aspects of the...
Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers
| Author | John J. Ross |
| ISBN | 0312600763 |
The doctor suddenly appeared beside Will, startling him. He was sleek and prosperous, with a dainty goatee. Though he smiled reassuringly, the poet noticed that he kept a safe distance. In a soothing, urbane voice, the physician explained the treatment: stewed prunes to evacuate the bowels; succulent...
Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders: An Urban Historical
A true tale of changing New York by Franz Lidz, whose Unstrung Heroes is a classic of hoarder lore.
Homer and Langley Collyer moved into their handsome brownstone in white, upper-class Harlem in 1909. By 1947, however, when the fire department had to carry Homer's body out of the house he hadn't...
Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
| Author | Philip Larkin |
| ISBN | 0571239099 |
Philip Larkin met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in autumn 1946, when they were both twenty-four; he was the newly-appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns...
