Secondhand Literary Biography Books

Jenny Woolf's biography of Lewis Carroll takes notice of the evidence that is now available to help us understand and appreciate this famous Victorian poet, mathematician, writer, photographer, and children's...

For nearly 50 years, Diana Athill edited (and nursed and coerced and coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the English language. In a prose style of inimitable wit...

'To read her is to restore the soul.' THE TIMES'No one is more graceful and accomplished than Leon.' WASHINGTON POST'Leon writes with great literary panache and evocative power about the...

Writing with unique access to his memories and his private papers, and with great love for his formidable body of work, Patrick French brings us unique and often surprising insights...

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge, were life-long friends. They were also the daughters of best friends: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the two poetic geniuses who shaped the Romantic...

When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. While he courted exam failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music,...

A biography of the poet Jessica Powers.

Annie Proulx, one of America's finest writers, invites us to share her experience in the building of her new home on a rich plot of untouched, unspoilt prairie and her...

In this third Why I Write volume, Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work "A sharply etched, unvarnished self-portrait."-Kirkus Reviews "[Myles] has a good...

`In one of tje funniest biographies I have ever read, Lewis assembles all the excellently entertaining anecdotes about this deeply loved, much mocked, sometimes reviled figure whose departure has robbed...

From her study of the Austen family papers, Claire Tomalin paints a rich, tragi-comic picture of the Austen clan and their neighbours, reaching the conclusion that the facts of Jane...

'Her talent seemed so effervescent, so unstoppable, that there was no predicting where it might take her' Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf HallSlipstream unearths the remarkable life of Elizabeth Jane...

In this sequel to The Flame of Thika, Elspeth Huxley takes up her story after the family returns to Kenya after the First World War. Her family and friends, their...

'So here I am, two hours into my sixty-sixth year...The truth is that I'm nastier than I used to be back when - back when I was sixty four, for...

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...

Following on from Osborne's first autobiographical book, "A Better Class of Person", this book looks at the period 1955 to 1966. It covers the foundation of the English Stage Company...

Based on letters and journals and youthful ledger books never before made available, and on interviews with descendants, this is a full and lively life of the prolific Victorian writer...

In July 1944, a French Air Force reconnaissance plane disappeared on a mission to the Alps. Neither the pilot, 44-year-old Antoine de St Exupery, nor the plane were ever traced....

Even as a young girl, growing up in the Bronx, Mary Higgins Clark knew she wanted to be a writer. The gift of storytelling was a part of her Irish...

One hundred years after his first novel was published P.G. Wodehouse still promises a release from everyday cares into a paradise of innocent comic mayhem. His many books are still...

This is a detailed textual and critical study of all Yeats's important autobiographical prose, concentrating on the book ^IAutobiographies but considering other texts as well. Contents: Introduction; John Sherman and^R...