UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · BIOGRAPHY · FICTION
Victoria Glendinning
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]
Writing about your mother isn't easy.
— from Sons & mothers
Most acclaimed
Jonathan Swift (Pimlico)
1999
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.
Trollope
1991
Trollope was in his thirties before his first novel was published; before his death at sixty-seven he had written nearly seventy books, as well as conducting a quite separate career in the Post Office. This authoritative and highly readable biography, by the editor of Trollope's Letters, draws a masterly portrait of an engaging, contradictory, extraordinary man and writer. N. John Hall writes with an unparalleled knowledge of his subject, vividly and with humor -- as alive to Trollope's shortcomings as to his startling powers. He shows us that, productive as he was, Trollope was also a writer of care and judgment, and more of an intellect than is often recognized. In this biography, Hall interweaves the public and social career -- as civil servant, traveller, fanatic rider to hounds -- with that of the writer, drawing on the works themselves as well as all relevant historical evidence. Above all, he never loses sight of the mystery and subtlety of Trollope's personality: the comic and creative genius of the man who arguably left behind him more good novels than any other writer in the language. - Jacket flap.