Like reading one of Elizabeth Bowen's great novels, this award winning biography is gently elegiac, beautifully written and fascinating. Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author's grandparents, this critically acclaimed biography deals with never-before-seen letters detailing the affair. A death in the family delivers Julia Parry a box of letters. Dusty with age they reveal a secret love affair between the celebrated novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the academic Humphry House, Julia's grandfather. So begins a life changing quest to understand the affair which had profound repercussions for Julia's family, not least her grandmother Madeline. Julia traces these three very different characters through 1930s Oxford and Ireland, Texas, Calcutta in the last days of Empire, and on into World War Two. With a supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf, much is revealed about her bookish and kindly grandfather, and his sudden death, and Parry is a spirited narrator who is clearly a great admirer of Bowen's fiction but isn't blindsided by this. The affair lasted roughly from 1933 to 1935 and, obsessed with hauntings, journeys and houses, Bowen might even approve of this book. 373pp, paperback. Photos.

George and Cassandra Austen came from markedly different backgrounds so social class and the tensions it can cause played a part in Jane Austen's life even before her birth in 1775. George possessed 'a most exquisite taste in every species of literature'. Here are extraordinary aspects of Austen's life, work and legacy in this collection of stories and trivia from her unassuming family origins, secret life and loves, and intriguing tales behind the literary and screen adaptations of her works. Covers the Austen family's long tenure at Steventon until the Rectory was finally destroyed by floods, Jane's juvenile parody History of England, the lifelong attachment between sisters Jane and Cassandra, notorious cousin Eliza, the Tom Lefroy affair and a foretaste of Pride and Prejudice, problems with publishers, Jane's 'marriage', gold chains and topaz crosses as gifts from a little brother, Jane's aunt put in prison for theft and shocking news of the move to Bath. A close confidante falls from her horse and suddenly dies, the Austen brothers avert a financial crisis, the final move to Chawton, Mansfield Park pioneers the theme of meritocracy, John Murray publishes Emma which has considerable impact with Scott's adulatory review, here are insights into her remarkable novels and their characters, the changing reception to the novels over the years and her sweeping legacy today. A fascinating collection, New full price, 144pp, well illustrated with photos and line art.

The Upstart Crow, Shakespeare's heyday in theatreland, final stage performance, retirement speech, Philip Henslowe the Elizabethan impresario, Ben Jonson, the birth of London's Globe Theatre and its rebuilding, stage costumes in Elizabethan England, make-up concoctions some harmless others not, memorials to Shakespeare, his characters, mysteries of his portrait, priceless First Folio, and his stellar legacy, here is a chronology of Shakespeare's plays, possible models for the comic character, the 'lost' plays, hellraisers. Also public scandals, toe-curling homage and Star Trek littered with Shakespeare references, and in popular songs and novels, plus the historical settings for Shakespeare's plays, insights into his most famous characters, tales from the theatres around the globe in a rich concoction of stories and trivia. New full price, 144pp, woodcut illus.

D. H. Lawrence is no longer censored but he is still on trial. History has remembered D. H. Lawrence not always flatteringly as a nostalgic modernist, a sexual liberator, a misogynist, a critic of genius, and a sceptic who told us not to look into his novels for 'the old stable ego', yet pioneered to the genre we now celebrate as auto-fiction. But where is the real Lawrence in all of this and how, 100 years after the publication of Women In Love, can we hear his voice above the noise? Delving into the memoirs of both those who loved and hated him most, Frances Wilson follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy, to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces his footsteps through the pages of his lesser-known work. She presents a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around the world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopia, and in bringing the true Lawrence into sharp focus, she shows how he speaks to us now more than ever. 'In this astonishing tale, rife with jealousy, messianism and blood, Wilson meets Lawrence on his own terms, offering readers a mythology of his deeply wild and complex spirit.' - Guardian. The book is divided into chapters Inferno: England 1915-19, Purgatory Italy 1919-22 and Paradise America 1922-25. In this way it is a triptych of self-contained biographical tales which take as their subject three versions of Lawrence with the focus on his middle years, the decade of superhuman energy and productivity between 1915 when The Rainbow was prosecuted, and 1925 when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Lawrence was never in the same place for more than a few months; he and his wife Frieda roamed the world like gypsies and slept like foxes in dens because Lawrence believed there was no progress without contraries, and each of these tales sees him in battle. Here was a man both censored and worshipped in his lifetime and biography of this calibre is rare. 488 page paperback.

Large, glamorous art publication by Philip Wilson Publishers of Bloomsbury, the topic is William Powell Frith (1819-1909), one of the most successful painters of the Victorian age, celebrated for his highly original depictions of modern life subjects in the 1850s and 1860s. He was virtually a household name due to the widespread dissemination of reproductive engravings which made his images familiar throughout the world. His three great panoramas of the contemporary world, Life at the Seaside (Ramsgate Sands), The Derby Day and The Railway Station depicted Victorians at leisure and are scrutinised in depth. Similarly covered is Frith's later and more exclusive panorama reconstructing the Private View of 1881 at the Royal Academy, where Oscar Wilde has centre stage. Essays explore important and hitherto neglected areas of his personal life and professional activity, of significant biographical interest are studies of his connections with Yorkshire, the county of his birth and also his first wife Isabelle's, and his friendships with the contemporary writers notably the sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and his historical genre pictures focussing on the early success of 'An English Merry-Making, A Hundred Years Ago.' An intriguing angle is the recreation of certain of his famous compositions as Tableaux on the London Stage, yet another fresh topic in this presentation of 'The People's Painter'. So lifelike are the eyes and skin in page after page of gorgeous colour images on these heavy glossy white pages - Poor Maria, The Beautiful Grisette, Vanessa who was a longtime lover and correspondent of Jonathan Swift. It was well known that Frith was a friend as well as a devotee of Charles Dickens and his paintings are brimming with life and incident such as Alexander Pope's vain declaration of love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The courtyard of Millbank Prison provides a unique view of life in disgrace wearing shaming uniform dotted with arrow motifs. Another favourite of ours is Frith being buttonholed by a flower seller as they stand against a backdrop of the Bay of Naples. 192 glamorous pages, 22.9 x 27.6cm.
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The house of Tudor is a favourite subject for film makers, and the dashing Robert Dudley who hoped to marry Queen Elizabeth I has been portrayed by a range of glamorous actors. When his first wife died from falling downstairs, Dudley was widely rumoured to have murdered her, and the author of this interesting new angle on Tudor history provides us with the full details of the autopsy and the machinations of Dudley's enemies in response to what they saw as a bid for the crown. A few years later the birth of a bastard son to Dudley's long-term mistress Douglass Sheffield was kept a secret, as was the marriage to Lettice Knollys which finally put paid to any ambitions he had to be the consort. Dudley's life thereafter continued full of intrigue, and the author describes his trip to the Netherlands at the head of an army which led to the offer of the governor-generalship of the United Provinces. On his return to England Dudley was instrumental in persuading Elizabeth to execute Mary Queen of Scots the following year. The author argues that the Dudley line of ruthless adventurers dominated the whole Tudor period, starting with Robert's grandfather Edmund who became right hand man to Henry VII through the influence of his second wife, Elizabeth Grey. Edmund's enforcing activities were directed towards the extortion of taxes, and it was he who falsely accused Agness Sunnyff of murdering a baby in order to extort money. On the accession of Henry VIII Edmund made a desperate play for the new king's favour but he lost and was executed. His son John Dudley embarked on a perilous career of service to successive monarchs, changing allegiance and religion and finally foundering on the project to bring his relation Lady Jane Grey to the throne. 534pp, colour reproductions.

Regency landowner, seducer and secret diarist, the book is a triumph of truth over fantasy. Anne Lister led an extraordinary, pioneering life, a woman who lived and loved as she pleased. It is of course the inspiration for the BBC TV drama series. Lister's journals were so shocking that the first person to crack their secret code hid them behind a fake panel in his ancestral home. Anne Lister was an intrepid world traveller and an unabashed lover of other women. In this bold new biography, prizewinning author Angela Steidele uses the diaries to create a portrait of Anne as we've never seen her before - a woman in some ways very much ahead of her time. Anne recorded everything from the most intimate details of her numerous amorous liaisons through to her plans to make her fortune by exploiting the coal seams under her family estate in Halifax, and her reaction to the Peterloo massacre. Selfish to the core, it seemed that her lover Ann Walker's fortune was Anne Lister's main aim and it is sad to read how things went after the marriage and their amazing journey to the Caucasus. The diaries cover Anne's first love affair with a girl at her school, her aspirations to rise socially and cultivate well-to-do friends, how her ambitions for wealth and status were often hampered by limited funds, and how her extraordinary drive and determination and intellect show her in a more positive light. But she was in her biographers' words 'a beast of a woman'. 'Anne had renewed her vows with Mariana three times, seduced Miss Vallance and Nantz Belcombe, slept countless times with Isabella Norcliffe, flirted with Harriet Milne, Lou Belbombe and Francis Pickford, spent a long time living in Paris with Maria Barlow and then a few weeks with Mme de Rosny. During all these entanglements, Sibella Maclean had been an iron in the fire...' Anne strung along her lovers with lies and omissions and her reputation may well have interested the Brontë sisters. Charlotte's unfeminine 'Shirley' and the mad Creole Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre may have been inspired by Anne Lister's first schoolgirl lover - mixed-race Eliza Raine who ended up in an insane asylum. Anne Lister climbed unconquered mountains and crossed the wilds of Russia in 1840 into the unheard depths of Azerbaijan and Georgia. The diaries have run to four million words! With illustrations and maps, 328pp, paperback.

Sub-titled 'The Many Lives of Aunt Munca' this an award-winning biography with a twist on every page. Aunt Munca flees the streets of Sheffield for a suite at Claridges, getting younger by the year and leaving behind her a trail of brazen lies and shattered pieties. In his family memoir, Ferdinand Mount pursues her with wit and skill through a career in which crime pays, marriage is for a week, and children are lost like old gloves. Grimly funny and superbly written, Mount unpeels the layers of his aunt's mysterious life like an experienced detective and the excitement of a fresh-eyed enthusiast. An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, and now with startling new material discovered by the author, we go on a voyage into a vanished moral world. Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand. Now a century later, a series of revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find out who this extraordinary millionairess really was. What he discovers is shocking and irretrievably sad, involving multiple deceptions, false identities and disguise and abandonments. A tantalising, gripping and poignant story of the end of the Victorian era and up to the highest echelons of English society between the wars. 304pp, paperback, well illus.

A prize winning biography of Barbara of Brandenburg who was nearly 50 years old when Andrea Mantegna painted her in 1470 at the side of her husband Ludovico of Gonzaga, surrounded by her many children in the court of Mantua. She complained to her cousin Maria that Mantegna had given her weary, jaundiced eyes and her face with no delicacy in it. "But Lady Julia, the dwarf, standing next to me, is staggeringly true to life". But who was the real Barbara of Brandenburg? Marie Ferranti takes us through the backdoor of everyday 15th century life into a world populated by some of the greatest men and artists of the age. In 1433, ten year old Barbara leaves her native Germany to marry the Prince of Mantua and when her husband leaves for war, she finds herself at the centre of one of the most refined courts in Europe. Seven years later when Ludovico returns victorious from his campaigns, she has to live with him through the most difficult trials - illnesses, mourning and the curse of his heredity - all Gonzaga women are born hunchbacked. Based on a series of letters between Barbara and her cousin Maria in which she recounts her daily life, dramas and jokes, this is fictional documentary biography at its most exquisite. 116 pages, paperback.

'The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America' is the sub-title of this chronical of the life of a remarkable chief. In the mid16th century, Spanish explorers in the Chesapeake Bay kidnapped an Indian youth, took him back to Spain, and subsequently to Mexico. During this time the boy lived in Madrid, Seville, Havana and Mexico City, becoming a favourite of King Philip II, and converting to Catholicism. Eventually after nearly a decade, he returned to Virginia with a group of Jesuits to establish a mission. Shortly after his arrival however he abandoned his fellow missionaries, rejoined his family, and soon organised a war party that killed the Spaniards. In the years that followed, Opechancanough (as the English called him) helped establish the most powerful chiefdom in the mid-Atlantic region. When English settlers founded Virginia in 1607, he fought tirelessly to drive them away, leading to a series of wars that spanned the next 40 years - the first Anglo-Indian wars in America - and came close to destroying the colony. However the English settlers proved more resilient than the Spanish missionaries had been 40 years earlier. Additional soldiers, weapons, and provisions arrived from England, forcing Opechancanough to continue his offensive on for decades. He survived to be nearly a hundred years old and died as he lived, fighting the invaders. In most Native American histories, Opechancanough generally plays a brief part as a violent and tragic figure, but James Horn constructs a remarkable life story that spans one century. He was the older brother of the more famous man we know as Powhatan, and here cutting-edge scholarship and vivid prose transports us into the mind of this indefatigable chief, exploring his early experiences of European society and lifelong struggle to save his people from conquest. 296pp, maps and woodcut illustrations. 2021 US first edition.