The busiest man in England

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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.

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Fred Kaplan

From a bitter childhood mired in poverty and hard work to a career as the most acclaimed and best-loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as tumultuous as any he created in his teeming novels of life in Victorian England. And no one has captured the rich texture of this life as colorfully and persuasively as Fred Kaplan in this acclaimed biography. Thoroughly researched, Dickens provides an absorbing and perceptive account of its subject as a singularly complex man and a consummate artist, offering readers new insights into Dickens' - and literature's - greatest works, such as Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist.

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Loraine Fletcher

Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) was born into the landed gentry and married off at 15, on the insistence of a hostile stepmother, to a wastrel from a West Indian family whose money came from the slave trade. When her husband's fecklessness forced her to support herself and their nine surviving children alone, she at once became a celebrated poet and novelist. Writing at the time of the French Revolution, she wanted change in England too and commented sharply on the injustice of England's class system, on the legalized looting of Empire and the legal prostitution of arranged marriages. Her Elegiac Sonnets with their lonely landscapes greatly influenced William Wordsworth, while Jane Austen devoured her satirical fiction and adapted her plots and settings for novels of her own. Her personality comes across vividly from her letters, published here for the first time, and from Loraine Fletcher's sympathetic, scholarly narrative.

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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.