Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women
10 best books like Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (Harriet Reisen): The Story of Charlotte's Web: E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, Tolstoy: A Russian Life, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Byron: Life and Legend, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Louisa May Alcott: A Biography: With an Introduction to the New Edition, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories
| Author | Michael Sims |
| ISBN | 0802777546 |
As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats-White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. Painfully...
| Author | John Matteson |
| ISBN | 0393059642 |
Louisa May Alcott is known universally. Yet during Louisa's youth, the famous Alcott was her father, Bronson, an eminent teacher and a friend of Emerson and Thoreau. He desired perfection, for the world and from his family. Louisa challenged him with her mercurial moods and yearnings for money and...
| 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...
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 | 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 | Margaret Fuller |
| ISBN | 0486406628 |
A woman of many gifts, Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) is most aptly remembered as America's first true feminist. In her brief yet fruitful life, she was variously author, editor, literary and social critic, journalist, poet, and revolutionary. She was also one of the few female members of the prestigious...
| Author | Madeleine B. Stern |
| ISBN | 1555534171 |
Louisa May Alcott really was an amazing woman. I knew her only from the four books about the March family (given that a fair majority of South African books are obtained from British publishers/printers we have Good Wives, rather than two parts of Little Women). I knew that she'd written some other books,...
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 | 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 | 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 | Selina Shirley Hastings |
| ISBN | 1400061415 |
He was a brilliant teller of tales, one of the most widely read authors of the twentieth century, and at one time the most famous writer in the world, yet W. Somerset Maugham’s own true story has never been fully told. At last, the fascinating truth is revealed in a landmark biography by the award-winning...
| 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 | Liel Leibovitz |
| ISBN | 0393070042 |
At the twilight of the nineteenth century, China sent a detachment of boys to America in order to learn the ways of the West, modernize the antiquated empire, and defend it from foreigners invading its shores. After spending a decade in New England’s finest schools, the boys re-turned home, driven...
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds
| Author | Lyndall Gordon |
| ISBN | 0670021938 |
In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin began a passionate love affair with Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife, setting in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of the Dickinson family. The feud that erupted as a result has continued for over a century. Lyndall Gordon,...
Mary Chesnut: A Diary From Dixie
| Author | Mary Boykin Chesnut |
| ISBN | 0517182661 |
This original diary of the wife of Confederate General James Chestnut, Jr., who was also an aide to President Jefferson Davis, provides an eyewitness narrative of all the years of the war. Period photographs illustrate this you-are-there account of the daily lives and tribulations of all who suffered...
| Author | Megan Marshall |
| ISBN | 0618711694 |
Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontes. The story of these remarkable sisters — and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day — has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall's monumental biograpy brings the era of creative...
| Author | Blake Bailey |
| ISBN | 1400043948 |
John Cheever spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. Written with unprecedented access to essential sources—including Cheever’s massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published—Bailey’s...
| Author | Louisa May Alcott |
| ISBN | 0316593621 |
I don't think I'd say that Louisa May Alcott kept "copious" journals... most of what she wrote seemed succinct and to-the-point. She decribes herself as moody, but her entries are full of humor and fun. I often wished she had included a little more detail about the people she wrote about there - I wondered...
| Author | Eve LaPlante |
| ISBN | 1451620675 |
Marmee & Louisa, hailed by NPR as one of the best books of 2012, paints an exquisitely moving and utterly convincing portrait of Louisa May Alcott and her mother, the real Marmee. Award-winning biographer Eve LaPlante mines the Alcotts' intimate diaries and other private papers, some recently...
As gripping as the best historical novel, Sisters of Fortune is the story of the exuberant Marianne, Bess, Louisa, and Emily Caton, the American sisters who enthralled the highest levels of English Regency society decades before the notorious Dollar Princesses of the Victorian era. The Caton sisters...
| Author | L.M. Montgomery |
| ISBN | 0195405862 |
An instant best-seller in Canada, the first volume of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery recorded the growing power and imagination of one of the world's best-loved writers, the author of the classic novel for children, Anne of Green Gables. The London Free Press hailed it as "pure gold, the deeply...
Thanksgiving: : The Pilgrims' First Year in America
| Author | Glenn Alan Cheney |
| ISBN | 0979803918 |
"Thanksgiving" is not about a holiday. It's about 102 people who came to the New World, suffered terribly, struggled courageously, and established the foundation of America. The prologue explores the reasons they left Europe. The book then puts the reader on the gun deck of the Mayflower where the...
Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years
| Author | David James Smith |
| ISBN | 0316035483 |
Nelson Mandela is well-known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world's elder statesman--the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison before becoming the first black president in South Africa....
