Victoria Glendinning
Personal Information
Description
Hon Victoria Glendinning CBE (23 April 1937) is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She is President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature. She was born in Sheffield to a Quaker family, Her father was Baron Seebohm. Glendinning grew up near York and went to the University of Oxford to study modern languages. In the second year of her degree, she married one of her Spanish lecturers, Professor Nigel Glendinning in 1958. They divorced in 1981. Her second husband Terence de Vere White died of Parkinson's disease in 1994 and she remarried in 1996. She had four sons (before she was 28) including Matthew Glendinning, with whom she coauthored the book Sons and Mothers, and the mathematician Paul Glendinning. Another son, Simon Glendinning, lectures in European Philosophy at the London School of Economics having previously taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury. [Wikipedia]
Books
Leonard Woolf
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.
Flight~Victoria Glendinning
"Martagon, an engineer by profession and loner by nature, falls head over heals in love for the very first time. He is masterminding the construction of an airport in Provence, exploiting his cutting-edge expertise in glass technology. The land on which the airport is built belonged to a feuding brother and sister and it is Marina, the sister, who throws the detached and rational Martagon so thoroughly off balance. Marina is beautiful, flamboyant, completely irresistible. He takes risks to be with her, loses his way both professionally and personally, and ends up questioning values he once took for granted."--BOOK JACKET.
Emerald City. Stories
Eleven stories on the vagaries of life. In Why China? a successful stockbroker yearns for the days when he was poor, in Passing the Hat, a wife observing a woman sleep around with men, is shocked to discover her own husband was one of them, while The Watch Trick compares the lives of two army friends, one who settled down, the other who didn't. By the author of The Invisible Circus.
Jonathan Swift (Pimlico)
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is an inexhaustibly intriguing figure in the literary and political history of England and Ireland. Best known as the author of Gulliver's Travels, he was an ordained clergyman whose enemies thought he did not believe in God. He became a legendary dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin whose ambition for church preferment in England was perpetually frustrated. For four short, intoxicating years he was the intimate of Queen Anne's chief ministers, as well as their publicist and propagandist - a "spin doctor" before the term was invented. His private life was intense and enigmatic. Two younger women, whom he called Stella and Vanessa, moved to Ireland to be close to him. He made both of them unhappy. Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer, and wit, Swift is the master of shock. His furious satirical responses to the corruption and hypocrisy he saw around him in private and public life have every relevance for our own times. His black imagination, and his preoccupation with the foulness that lies beneath the thin veneer of artifice and civilization, gave a new adjective - Swiftian - to the lexicon of criticism. Like his Gulliver in the land of Lilliput, Swift is a problem in perspective and scale. Victoria Glendinning has taken a literary zoom lens to illuminate this proud and intractable man. She investigates at close range the main events and relationships of Swift's life, providing a portrait set in a tapestry of controversy and paradox.
Grown-ups, The
Who killed Leo Ulm - was it in fact a murder? This novel is a portrait of Leo - academic, TV pundit and globe-trotter - who richly deserves his nemesis. The main theme of the book is Leo's womanizing tendencies and the manner in which he lives off adoration, female dependence and love.
Electricity
Traces the sexual and intellectual awakening of a Victorian Englishwoman, who marries an electrical engineer and becomes caught up in the excitement of the new science and the charms of a country aristocrat.
Anthony Trollope
The butcher's daughter
"The atmospheric novel set during the Tudor era of a young woman's struggle to define herself in a world of uncertainty, intrigue, and danger in a period of great upheaval In 1535, England is hardly a wellspring of gender equality; it is a grim and oppressive age where women--even the privileged few who can read and write--have little independence. In The Butcher's Daughter, it is this milieu that mandates Agnes Peppin, daughter of a simple country butcher, to leave her family home in disgrace and live out her days cloistered behind the walls of the Shaftesbury Abbey. But with her great intellect, she becomes the assistant to the Abbess and as a result integrates herself into the unstable royal landscape of King Henry VIII. As Agnes grapples with the complex rules and hierarchies of her new life, King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself the new head of the Church. Religious houses are being formally subjugated and monasteries dissolved, and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. The cosseted world in which Agnes has carved out for herself a sliver of liberty is shattered. Now, free at last to be the master of her own fate, she descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive by any means necessary... The Butcher's Daughter is the riveting story of a young woman facing head-on the obstacles carefully constructed against her sex. This dark and affecting novel intricately depicts the lives of women in the sixteenth century in a world dominated by men"--