Bøger i Literary Lives serien

"The Awakening", the story of a woman who defied social and sexual conventions, elicited negative reviews, denying Chopin prominence until the mid-20th century. This study sets her in the context of 19th-century American women writers to show how standards of literary propriety affected her career.

In a letter, Katherine Mansfield writes: 'I hate the sort of licence that English people give themselves - to spread over and flop and roll about. Her sharp-edged fiction is discussed in relation to her involvement with Post-Impressionist painting and painters.

John Dryden was England's most outstanding and controversial writer for the last four decades of the seventeenth century. He dominated the literary world as a satirist, a skilled and versatile dramatist, a pioneer of literary criticism, a writer of religious poetry, and an eloquent translator from the great classical poets.

More than most writers, Robert Louis Stevenson requires a Literary Life. Fascination with Stevenson's life (the 'Stevenson biography' is almost a minor genre) has tended to eclipse his literary achievement.

Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life situates the individual works of Marlowe within the context of his overall literary career.

This account of Orwell's life is chiefly concerned with what influenced Orwell, his relations with publishers and editors, and the analysis of certain key experiences - the deposition that during the Spanish Civil War he was guilty of espionage and high treason;

This comprehensive account of the writing life of Henry James aims at providing a critical overview of all his important writings, firmly set in two contexts: that of James's practical career as a novelist in America, England, and Europe;

A concise study of the life and poetry of the Victorian priest-poet. Gerald Roberts gives a chronological description and analysis of Hopkins's career and writing, and pays due attention to the Victorian and Jesuit background.

A clearly written, insightful study of Nabokov the novelist, providing an expert analysis of the 17 novels he wrote during a career spanning more than 50 years: one of the most impressive, challenging, and controversial literary achievements of our time.

This work relates Hardy's life to his career, his methodological preparation during the first 30 years of his life for that career, the writing of his 14 published novels and the fame they brought him. It also offers a culmination of his life as a writer.

Emphasizing Frances Burney's professionalism and her courage, Janice Farrar Thaddeus shows the protean writer who recognised her abilities and exercised them, always carefully shaping her career.

This comprehensive overview of Mary Shelley's life as an author frequently reads like an anthology of extracts from some of the most lurid and sensationalist novels of the early 19th century.

George Eliot (Marian Evans) as a writer of fiction is the central theme of this literary life.

This largely chronological study of Iris Murdoch's literary life begins with her fledgling publications at Badminton School and Oxford, and her Irish heritage. It moves through the novels of the next four decades and concludes with an account of the biographical, critical and media attention given to her life and work since her death in 1999.

This largely chronological study of Iris Murdoch's literary life begins with her fledgling publications at Badminton School and Oxford, and her Irish heritage. It moves through the novels of the next four decades and concludes with an account of the biographical, critical and media attention given to her life and work since her death in 1999.

Drawing on a series of new sources, this biography of Ezra Pound - the first to appear in more than a decade - outlines his contribution to modernism through a detailed account of his development, influence and continued significance. His roles as editor, translator and critic, plus his attempt to complete The Cantos , are also studied.