"Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era's own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer - one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart - so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love?"--Publisher's description.

Award-winning biographer Fitzsimons uncovers the little-known details of Nesbit's life, introducing readers to the Fabian Society cofounder and fabulous socialite who hosted legendary parties and had admirers by the dozen, including George Bernard Shaw.

Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth were born just four years apart, in the 1770s, in a world torn between heady revolutionary ideas and fierce conservatism, and both were influenced by the Romantic ideals of Dorothy's brother, William Wordsworth, and his friends. This book compares their upbringing and education, home lives and loves and, above all, their emotional and creative worlds. Original insights include a new discovery of serious depression...

"How does a story begin? Sometimes it begins with a dream, and a dreamer. Mary is one such dreamer, a little girl who learns to read by tracing the letters on the tombstone of her famous feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and whose only escape from her strict father and overbearing stepmother is through the stories she reads and imagines. Unhappy at home, she seeks independence, and at the age of sixteen runs away with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley,...

"When Jan Morris passed away in 2020, she was considered one of Britain's best-loved writers. The author of Venice, Pax Britannica, Conundrum, and more than fifty other books, her work was known for its observational genius, lyricism, and humor, and had earned her a passionate readership around the world. Morris's life was no less fascinating than her oeuvre. Born James Humphry Morris in 1926, a childhood spent amidst Oxford's Gothic beauty and military...

Chronicles the life of the nineteenth-century literary master from the challenges he faced as the imprisoned son of a profligate father, his rise to one of England's foremost novelists, and the personal demons that challenged his relationships.

"During his regular days in London, Kenneth Grahame sat behind a mahogany desk as Secretary of the Bank of England; on weekends he retired to the house in the country that he shared with his fanciful wife, Elspeth, and their fragile son, Alistair, and took lengthy walks along the Thames in Berkshire, "tempted by the treasures of hedge and ditch; the rapt surprise of the first lords-and-ladies, the rustle of a field-mouse, the splash of a frog." The...

"With unprecedented access to its subject's personal records and informed by fresh, unvarnished anecdotes from family, friends, and colleagues, Edmund Gordon's biography provides the first full account of Angela Carter's amazing life and enduring work"--