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I’m an author and a college writing professor with an MFA in Creative Writing. Additionally, I am involved in and teach other art forms and the humanities including music, film, and literature. I enjoy researching and writing about literary figures, musicians, and other creatives, all of which have been a focus in my children’s books.
A luminous portrait of Jane Austen chocked full of spirited text and shimmery illustrations that capture the times. The story highlights the beginnings of Austen’s great career as a novelist from her youngest days all the way to famous writer. It’s a great addition to any classroom or library. Like Jane Taylor before her, Austen’s success paved the way for women authors to come.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is one of our greatest writers.
But before that, she was just an ordinary girl.
In fact, young Jane was a bit quiet and shy; if you had met her back then, you might not have noticed her at all. But she would have noticed you. Jane watched and listened to all the things people around her did and said and locked those observations away for safekeeping.
Jane also loved to read. She devoured everything in her father's massive library, and before long she began creating her own stories. In her…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Jane Austen now dominates my teaching and research. This was not always so. I was trained in the writers that came before Austen and was happily teaching classes on them when someone at my university asked me to teach a class on Jane Austen. At first, I refused to switch. I countered, “She does not need yet another class.” But I agreed, and soon, I was hooked on her humor and her deft responses to those earlier writers. While the new graphic novel is my third book about Jane, I have not exhausted the things to research! The more I know, the more I admire her writings and her life.
I love this biography for its quirky materialist approach. Each chapter zooms in upon an object that survives from Austen’s lifetime (a shawl, a watercolor, an item of jewelry, a piece of furniture) and conjures an incident in Austen’s life from the details of that object.
In the end, I learned as much about the famous writer as from a traditional chronology, but the manner of getter there was more like an animated museum exhibition than a cradle-to-grave narrative.
Who was the real Jane Austen? Overturning the traditional portrait of the author as conventional and genteel, bestseller Paula Byrne's landmark biography reveals the real woman behind the books.
In this new biography, bestselling author Paula Byrne (author of Perdita, Mad World) explores the forces that shaped the interior life of Britain's most beloved novelist: her father's religious faith, her mother's aristocratic pedigree, her eldest brother's adoption, her other brothers' naval and military experiences, her relatives in the East and West Indies, her cousin who lived through the trauma of the French Revolution, the family's amateur theatricals, the female novelists…
Jane Austen now dominates my teaching and research. This was not always so. I was trained in the writers that came before Austen and was happily teaching classes on them when someone at my university asked me to teach a class on Jane Austen. At first, I refused to switch. I countered, “She does not need yet another class.” But I agreed, and soon, I was hooked on her humor and her deft responses to those earlier writers. While the new graphic novel is my third book about Jane, I have not exhausted the things to research! The more I know, the more I admire her writings and her life.
I relish the intimacy of reading Austen’s private letters, and this is the best and most complete edition. Although her sister Cassandra notoriously burned many of her letters, the 160-or-so that survive offer plenty of unguarded moments to satisfy curiosity about her daily life.
In fact, I think Austen’s best lines are not from her novels but from her letters to Cassandra. For example, on the fashion for decorating bonnets, she quips “I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.” And in a note about their garden: “I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.”
Jane Austen's letters afford a unique insight into the daily life of the novelist: intimate and gossipy, observant and informative, they bring alive her family and friends, her surroundings and contemporary events with a freshness unparalleled in biography. Above all we recognize the unmistakable voice of the author of Pride and Prejudice, witty and amusing as she describes the social life of town and country, thoughtful and constructive when writing about the business of literary composition.
R. W. Chapman's ground-breaking edition of the collected Letters first appeared in 1932, and a second edition followed twenty years later. A third edition,…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
When I was a little girl, my parents bought me a children’s edition of Pride and Prejudice. Ever since, I have loved Jane Austen’s works. As I grew older, I really enjoyed learning about her, and researching the history of her times. I hope you will enjoy reading these books as much as I did!
Hundreds (possibly thousands) of biographies of Austen have been written, but Tomalin’s work has long been a favourite of mine.
Her sympathetic portrait of Jane digs deep into her early family life, schooldays, literary influences, and early authorship. Jane’s relationship with her mother; her family’s encouragement of her writings; the fear of poverty after her father’s death; the disastrous (rejected) marriage proposal, and her literary legacy are all detailed with warmth and energy.
The novels of Jane Austen depict a world of civility, reassuring stability and continuity, which generations of readers have supposed was the world she herself inhabited. Claire Tomalin's biography paints a surprisingly different picture of the Austen family and their Hampshire neighbours, and of Jane's progress through a difficult childhood, an unhappy love affair, her experiences as a poor relation and her decision to reject a marriage that would solve all her problems - except that of continuing as a writer. Both the woman and the novels are radically reassessed in this biography.
When I was fourteen years old, my family moved from Texas to London for a year, and I started going to a little second-hand book shop around the corner. It was run by a long-haired Canadian, who always smoked a pipe. There were only three or four aisles, plus a cluttered backroom. You could pick up a 19th-century edition of the complete works of Shelley, with uncut pages, for two pounds. One volume led to another, in the same way that one friendship can lead to another, or introduce you to a new circle of people. Twenty-odd years later, I decided to write a novel about some of these writers.
How much would you be willing to give up for fame and greatness?
By 1895, Henry James had written a number of all-time classics, including Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, but had never achieved the kind of commercial or popular success he thought he deserved. So in his fifties, he started writing for the theater, hoping to break through.
The Master begins with the London opening of his play Guy Domville, which turns out to be a flop, and follows James as he comes to terms with this failure, and all the other sacrifices he has to make – in his personal and sexual life, too – in order to become the writer he wants to be.
Nineteenth-century writer Henry James is heartbroken when his first play performs poorly in contrast to Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and struggles with subsequent doubts about his sexual identity.
Visiting author houses and museums has always been a favored pastime of mine and was the inspiration to write the travel guide Novel Destinations. Complementary to writing nonfiction about classic writers, I love reading novels featuring them as characters. Fiction authors adhere to biographical details as well, but they have a freer hand with the narrative to color outside the lines and to color in details and explore feelings and motivations. Through their narratives they turn these literary figures into flesh-and-blood characters and allow the reader to step into their storied lives.
Daphnehas numerous elements that I particularly adore in a story: a classic writer as a character, an English manor house setting, and a mystery. Layer in a Brontë connection, and it’s a perfectly pleasing literary page-turner. In 1957, Daphne du Maurier is at her remote, seaside mansion in Cornwall, distracting herself from personal woes by researching a biography about Branwell Brontë, reprobate and possibly misunderstood brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Intertwined is a second storyline set in present-day London, as a lonely young woman, newly married to a mysterious older man seemingly still in thrall to his first wife, becomes caught up in a fifty-year-old mystery involving du Maurier and the Brontës.
It is 1957. The author Daphne du Maurier, beautiful, famous, despairing as her marriage falls apart, finds herself haunted by Rebecca, the heroine of her most famous novel, written twenty years earlier. Resolving to write herself out of her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell, the reprobate brother of the Bronte sisters, and begins a correspondence with the enigmatic bibliophile Alex Symington as she researches a biography. But behind Symington's respectable scholarly surface is a slippery character with much to hide, and soon truth and fiction have become indistinguishable.In present-day London, a lonely young woman, newly married after a…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Visiting author houses and museums has always been a favored pastime of mine and was the inspiration to write the travel guide Novel Destinations. Complementary to writing nonfiction about classic writers, I love reading novels featuring them as characters. Fiction authors adhere to biographical details as well, but they have a freer hand with the narrative to color outside the lines and to color in details and explore feelings and motivations. Through their narratives they turn these literary figures into flesh-and-blood characters and allow the reader to step into their storied lives.
“Long ago Virginia decreed, in the way that Virginia decrees, that I was the painter and she the writer.” Vanessa and Her Sisteris a portrait of two extraordinary and unconventional women, Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell. The story is told in the form of a diary kept by Vanessa, beginning at the turn of the 20th century with the formation of the Bloomsbury Group in London. Priya Parmar has created a sympathetic yet honest portrayal of Virginia Woolf, her genius and her often precarious mental state, and the impact it had on her family—in particular Vanessa, who was an important and steadying influence for her sister and a talented artist in her own right.
A New York Times Notable Book • An Entertainment Weekly “Must List” Pick • “Prepare to be dazzled.”—Paula McLain • “Quite simply astonishing.”—Sarah Blake
What if Virginia Woolf’s sister had kept a diary? For fans of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank comes a spellbinding new story of the inseparable bond between Virginia and her sister, the gifted painter Vanessa Bell, and the real-life betrayal that threatened to destroy their family. Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “an uncanny success” and based on meticulous research, this stunning novel illuminates a little-known episode in the celebrated sisters’ glittering…
I have always tried to find books that explain and explore my life stage. When I was a young mother of little babies, I read many books about early motherhood. When I was studying and travelling and working as a waitress, those topics were represented in my reading too. Now that I’m a woman writer in midlife, with growing children and an art practice, I’m keen to read books by and about women writers who evoke the joys and struggles of this period: aging, the tensions between freedom and responsibility, marriage and separation, ambition and desire.
This book is a bible for women in midlife. One of Levy’s ‘living memoirs’, it captures the author’s experience of leaving her marriage at fifty and remaking her life as a writer.
The pose is beautiful: spare and elegant. Importantly, the book explores how it is possible to create a life focused on artistic pursuit, children, and friendship, as opposed to romantic partnership, material wealth, and conservative notions of stability.
I reread it every year to remind myself of what is possible.
A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY WINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020
Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, discover the powerful second memoir in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography'.
'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer _________________________________
'Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don't want to hold it together . . .'
The final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography', Real…
I have been moved by women’s stories that are buried in time (but not quite gone!) since I was a young girl. As a college student and now professor (I teach writing and gender studies), much of my work is focused on telling hidden stories for the first time and stories where the record needs correcting. This is probably to do with my childhood; I am the oldest daughter in a loving but difficult Irish-Catholic family where women were often shamed for many reasons. When I was 15, I read Sylvia Plath for the first time and knew—there was more to this story, and I meant to find it out.
Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes’s lovers in the 1970s, at the height of Sylvia Plath’s early fame. I arrived at her memoir as research for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, but I stayed because Tennant’s writing is so witty and clever, full of riotous anecdotes of her time publishing chic literary magazines in 1970s London (she tries to steal, and sell, a family snapshot of Princess Margaret, nude on a French beach, for seed money, which ends in hilarious disaster).
Tennant never descends into self-pity or high drama in describing the dark and mysterious Hughes, who believes a random fox on the road is his dead wife returning to him and tries to convince Tennant that frozen salmon at a third-rate London restaurant is fresh and delivering life force to him. Instead, she sneaks in the violence done to her by Hughes in moments drenched in myth…
Burnt Diaries is Emma Tennant's third volume of memoirs, set mostly during the 1970s, in which she lays bare the experience of her affair with Ted Hughes while she was editor of the avant-garde literary magazine, Bananas. Tennant's insights are engaging and honest - she offers perceptions of the writers that contributed to her magazine - from Angela Carter who was commissioned to write The Company of Wolves for it, to JG Ballard who was supportive of the magazine from its inception and wrote a story for each issue. Running a new literary magazine brought Tennant into contact with a…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
My memoir, Circling Home: What I Learned by Living Elsewhere, details my own trajectory in trying to find my voice and métier as a writer. I’ve kept a journal since I was a teenager, trained to be a journalist in college, and worked as an investigative reporter on a newspaper column and a news show in my twenties. When my husband and I moved abroad, I got a book contract for my PhD thesis and also published my research in academic journals. I wrote travel articles and profiles of people I met while living in East and West Africa. Working with a writing group of friends, I finished two novels before embarking on my memoir.
This memoir and Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, opened my eyes to the struggles of writers and actors in the UK—especially women of color and immigrants—as they tried to find their voices and places and in literary circles.
Raised in a big family by a Nigerian father and British mother, Evaristo describes her upbringing and her efforts to find her voice when there were few venues for writers of color. Her theory of unstoppability is deeply inspiring for anyone who faces roadblocks in pursuing their passions, particularly writers who experienced the sting of multiple rejections before having their work accepted.
From the bestselling and Booker Prize–winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism
Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize win was a historic and revolutionary occasion, with Evaristo being the first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize in its fifty-year history. Girl, Woman, Other was named a favorite book of the year by President Obama and Roxane Gay, was translated into thirty-five languages, and has now reached more than a million readers.
Evaristo’s astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a vibrant…
