Bottone di Puškin

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Shari Benstock

The first new biography of America's foremost woman of letters in twenty years, No Gifts from Chance presents an Edith Wharton for our times. Far from the emotionally withdrawn and neurasthenic victim of earlier portraits, she is revealed here as an ambitious, disciplined, and self-determined woman who fashioned life to her own desires. Drawing on government records, legal and medical documents, and recently opened collections of Wharton's letters, Shari Benstocks̀ biography offers new information on what have been called the key mysteries of her life: the question of her paternity, her troubled relations with her mother and older brothers, her marriage to manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, and her extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton. No Gifts from Chance also examines long-ignored facets of Wharton's life - her complex and often calculating relationships with publishers, her internationally acclaimed charitable work during World War I, and the poignant story of her ultimate financial distress that contributed to her death, a story told here for the first time. At the center of this biography is Wharton's writing life. No Gifts from Chance charts her immense literary productivity (some forty-seven books, including The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome), tracking her writing processes from notebook entries through editorial revisions and examining the critical reception of her narrative fiction, poetry, travel writing, literary and cultural criticism, and memoir. Here, too, is a rare glimpse of the intricate relationship between the writer's public reputation and her private life, from her lonely literary apprenticeship in late-Victorian America to her emergence as a literary figure in Edwardian England and Belle Epoque Paris, when she developed enduring friendships with Henry James and Bernard Berenson, to her Age of Acclaim as America's most respected writer during the postwar jazz age. A magisterial Edith Wharton dominates these pages: astute and tough-minded in business, passionate and sexually confident in love, audacious and prolific in her art, principled and courageous in her life. This is the story of an artist who had no role models in a society that feared creative and independent women, but who triumphantly defied convention and made herself into America's first great and most beloved woman novelist.

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Nicholas Murray

Matthew Arnold is a pivotal figure in the literature of the nineteenth century; his poems are still widely read and his social criticism continues to influence contemporary scholars. This comprehensive biography, the first in many years, brings the surprisingly modern figure of Arnold back to life, firmly establishing him as one of the most eminent Victorian writers. Through years of research and a number of previously untouched sources, Nicholas Murray presents a fully rounded biography of one of literature's greatest figures. Here, readers will see Matthew Arnold as few have witnessed him before: as a masterful writer, certainly, but also as a devoted family man and a powerful critic of Victorian materialism. With sixteen pages of rare black and white photographs, A Life of Matthew Arnold is a fascinating look at one of England's most intriguing and influential poets.

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Nicola J. Watson

Whatever happened to the epistolary novel? Why was it that by 1825 the principal narrative form of eighteenth-century fiction had been replaced by the third-person and often historicized models which have predominated ever since? Nicola Watson's original and wide-ranging study charts the suppression of epistolary fiction, exploring the attempted radicalization of the genre by Wollstonecraft and other feminists in the 1790s; its rejection and parody by Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth: the increasingly discredited role played by letters in the historical novels of Jane Porter, Sydney Morgan, and Walter Scott; and their troubling, ghostly presence in the gothic narratives of James Hogg and Charles Maturin. The shift in narrative method is seen as a response to anxieties about the French Revolution, with the epistolary, feminized, and sentimental plot replaced by a more authoritarian third-person mode as part of a wider redrawing of the relation between the individual and social consensus. This is a brilliant and innovative reading of the place of the novel in the reformulation of British national identity in the Napoleonic period, throwing new light on writers as diverse as Hazlitt, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, Helen Maria Williams, and Byron.

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Norman Rose

"Harold Nicolson, born in the late Victorian age, scion of a privileged family, was a man of extraordinary gifts. As a diplomat, a glittering career beckoned. But his talents extended well beyond the conference chamber, for he was also a renowned politician, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, journalist, broadcaster and gardener. His position in society and politics, and his flair for recording what he witnessed, allowed Nicolson an insight into the most dramatic events of British, indeed world, history, from the peace settlements of 1919 to the Abdication Crisis, from the events leading to the Second World War to Suez." "Nicolson's personal life was no less dramatic. Married to Vita Sackville-West, one of the most famous writers of her day, their marriage survived, even prospered, despite their both being practising homosexuals. Unashamedly elitist, bound together by their literary, social, and intellectual pursuits, moving in the refined circles of the Bloomsbury group and other literary and social coteries, they viewed life from the rarified peaks of aristocratic haughtiness. At Sissinghurst Castle, their home for more than thirty years, their shared passion for gardening led to the creation of one of the most magnificent gardens in England."--BOOK JACKET.