Biography: literary

'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.' Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure, whose extraordinary life is a study in self-invention. Born into an age when women could neither vote nor own property once ...

'The Waste Land' is the greatest poem of the age. But a century after its publication in 1922, T.S. Eliot's masterpiece remains a work of comparative mystery. In this gripping account, award-winning biographer Matthew Hollis reconstructs the making of the poem and brings its times vividly to life...

Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own - when she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shape...

Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own - when she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shape...

20 years after living there as a child, Alexis Keir returns to the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent. He is keen to uncover lost memories and rediscover old connections. But he also carries with him the childhood scars of being separated from his parents and put into uncaring hands. Inspired by t...

Joan Didion was a writer's writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life's telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world, uns...

When Rhiannon fell in love with, and eventually married her flatmate, she imagined they might one day move on. But this is London in the age of generation rent, and so they share their home with a succession of friends and strangers while saving for a life less makeshift. The desire for a baby is...

When Rhiannon fell in love with, and eventually married her flatmate, she imagined they might one day move on. But this is London in the age of generation rent, and so they share their home with a succession of friends and strangers while saving for a life less makeshift. The desire for a baby is...

Surprisingly little has been written about second-generation Bloomsbury who tantalised the original 'Bloomsburies' at Gordon Square parties with their captivating looks and provocative ideas. 'Young Bloomsbury' introduces us to an extraordinarily colourful cast of characters, including novelist a...

From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H.G. Wells' extraordinary...