Victoria Glendinning

The award-winning author Victoria Glendinning was commissioned by Rebecca West herself to write a 'short' biography:she has achieved an exceptionally vivid and moving portrait of this remarkable woman. The story of Rebecca West,who lived from 1892 until 1983,is the story of a twentieth century women.As a teenager,she marched with the suffragettes; she had an affair with H G Wells and became an unmarried mother.A radical socialist in her youth and a passionate opponent of Communism in her later years,she won fame as a novelist,critic,travelk-writer and journalist.But her personal life was often as stormy and complex as her public life. In this sympathetic but clear-eyed biography,Victoria Glendinning tells a disturbing story that will evoke admiratrion and pity for an extraordinary woman.

A Life

Rebecca West

Vita the Life of Vita Sackville West

England, 1535. Women-- even the privileged few who can read and write-- have little independence. Agnes Peppin, daughter of a butcher, left her family in disgrace and is living out her days behind the walls of the Shaftesbury Abbey. As assistant to the Abbess she becomes integrated into the unstable royal landscape of King Henry VIII. As he proclaims himself the new head of the Church, religious houses are being subjugated; the Abbey is no exception. Free to be the master of her own fate, Agnes must use her wits and test her moral convictions against her need to survive by any means necessary. -- adapted from jacket.

A Novel

The Butcher's Daughter

Electricity

Jonathan Swift (Pimlico)

Anthony Trollope is, with Dickens, the most enduringly popular Victorian novelist. All of his 47 novels have been printed - two of which have been made into TV series, The Pallisers and The Barchester Chronicles.

Trollope

Andrew Brown

George Sand

The Devil’s Pool is one of a group of pastoral novels inspired by the countryside of Nohant in Berry, where George Sand grew up. These novels are simple stories of country life, in which Sand records local customs and manners, depicting a timeless idyll, unaffected by the outside world and the political events of the time. With his wife dead and three young children to raise, ploughman Germaine decides that the time has come to marry again. He embarks on a journey to meet a rich widow, Catherine Leonard, in a match that has been approved by his father-in-law; however, he finds her proud and vain and surrounded by other suitors. Germaine prefers the company of Marie, a young shepherdess from his own village, but she is insistent that she wants a younger, more suitable husband. Influential French author George Sand is best known for two groups of novels: a series of romantic tales and a collection of country-life idylls.

The Devil's Pool

An account of the life and career of the Bloomsbury political intellectual and husband of Virginia Woolf covers his comfortable Jewish childhood, role in inspiring the League of Nations, and relationships with such figures as E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot. 40,000 first printing.

A Biography

Leonard Woolf

The Whitbread Prize-winning biography of Vita Sackville-West. Vita Sackville-West was a vital, gifted and complex woman. A dedicated writer, she made her mark as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist and broadcaster. She was also one of the most influential English gardeners of the century, creating with her husband the famous gardens at Sissinghurst. In her Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Glendinning documents Vita's extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband, and her two sons together with her unpublicised love affairs. Vita was determined to be more than just a married woman and mother; her passionate, secretive character, and the strains, mistakes and achievements of her remarkable life makes this an absorbing and disturbing book.

The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Vita

The story of Rebecca West is the story of 20th-century women. As a teenager, she marched with the suffragettes; she had an affair with H.G. Wells and became an unmarried mother; and she won fame as a novelist, critic, travel-writer and journalist.

Celebrated novelist, acerbic critic, and journalist without peer, friend and lover of the great and gifted, social and sexual rebel, observer of modern history's turning points, Rebecca West led one of the great lives of the twentieth century. In this first full-scale biography of Rebecca West, the widely admired biographer Victoria Glendinning captures that life in all its disturbing brilliance and haunting pain.

'I always wanted everything so frantically, and I'm just the person that can't have them.' Based on family papers and memories, this picture of middle class life at the end of the nineteenth century tells the poignant story of Winnie Seebohm, Victoria Glendinning's great-aunt, who in 1885 was one of the early students at Newnham College, Cambridge. Though much loved by her family, Winnie was stifled in her desire for life and died at the age of twenty-two.

The Short Life of a Victorian Daughter

A Suppressed Cry

Victoria Glendinning's

Her looks attracted Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. Among her friends were Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The 1930s she spent in penury, writing fiction, biography and verse. Only when Yeats hailed her as 'a major poet' did her work reach a wider audience, whereupon Edith Sitwell set off to conquer New York and Hollywood. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, this is the definitive portrait of a spontaneous, gallant, yet tragically insecure woman. 'The excellence of Mrs Glendinning's book is that it remains wise and balanced while never sacrificing critical edge... It's hard to imagine a life of Edith Sitwell that could surpass it.' John Carey, "Sunday Times"

A Unicorn Among Lions

Edith Sitwell

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the charismatic and persuasive founder of Singapore and Governor of Java. An English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, zoologist and civil servant, he carved an extraordinary (though brief) life for himself in South East Asia. The tropical, disease-ridden settings of his story are as dramatic as his own trajectory - an obscure young man with no advantages other than talent and obsessive drive, who changed history by establishing - without authority - on the wretchedly unpromising island of Singapore, a settlement which has become a world city. After a turbulent time in the East Indies, Raffles returned to the UK and turned to his other great interests - botany and zoology. He founded London Zoo in 1826, the year of his death.Raffles remains a controversial figure, and in the first biography for over forty years, Victoria Glendinning charts his prodigious rise within the social and historical contexts of his world. His domestic and personal life was vivid and shot through with tragedy. His own end was sad, though his fame immortal.

Raffles and the Golden Opportunity 1781-1826

A biography of the acclaimed Anglo-Irish novelist follows the formation of her character and the growth of her art from her childhood in a great ancestral manor in Ireland to her discovery of America and international fame. Reprint.

Elizabeth Bowen

Judith Robertson

The love affair between the celebrated writer Elizabeth Bowen and the elegant and charming Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie blossomed quickly after their first meeting in 1941 and continued over the next three decades until Bowen's death. Published for the first time, accompanied by extracts from Ritchie's remarkably candid diaries, the love letters of Elizabeth Bowen reveal an intelligent, passionate and wonderfully funny woman. In her letters and his diaries we hear the lovers' voices. Set against an ever-changing backdrop, from the Second World War to the Swinging Sixties, and featuring a glorious cast of socialites, writers and politicians, including Nancy Mitford, Iris Murdoch, Isaiah Berlin and John F Kennedy, Love's Civil War is at once a fascinating and intimate portrait of a great love that endures distance, circumstance and time.

Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, 1941-1973

Love's Civil War

Many people today know Leonard Woolf mainly through the surname of his wife, Virginia, or his role in supporting her through her mental illness, depicted in films like The Hours. Some critics see him as his wife's oppressor. In Victoria Glendinning's biography, for the first time we see the whole man. As well as being a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, Leonard was a formidable figure in his own right, first as an innovative civil administrator in Ceylon, then as a writer, leading light of the Fabian society and publisher of TS Eliot, EM Forster, Robert Graves, Katherine Mansfield and of course Virginia Woolf. He was interested in everything and knew everybody. The achievement of Glendinning's book is to make its readers wish that they knew him too.

Victoria Glendinning provides a woman's view of Anthony Trollope, placing emphasis on family, particularly on his relationship with his mother. But it is Anthony as a husband and lover that intrigues her most. She looks at the nature of his love for his wife, Rose and at his love for Kate Field.

From Victoria Glendinning, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and (twice) the Whitbread Prize for Biography. ‘It’s Succession in tailcoats and spats ... This is a vivid and eye-opening group biography, backgrounded by the rise of supermarket moguls from humble beginnings’ Sunday Times

Victoria Glendinning

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