Hermione Lee Bücher

'Mein Gott, wie schreibt man eine Biographie?' Dieses Zitat Virginia Woolfs eröffnet eine Lebensbeschreibung, die in vielen Rezensionen als biographisches Meisterstück gerühmt worden ist. Mit ihrem monumentalen Werk macht Hermione Lee unser Bild von Virginia Woolf um einige Klischees ärmer und um viele Nuancen reicher. Sie setzt sich intensiv und skeptisch mit den oft wiederholten Darstellungen von ihr als Opfer - ihres düsteren viktorianischen Elternhauses, der sexuellen Zudringlichkeit ihrer älteren Brüder, ihrer Geisteskrankheit - auseinander und zeigt, mit welchem Mut Virginia Woolf sich im Lauf ihres Lebens ihren frühen Erfahrungen und inneren Widersprüchen stellte und sie kraftvoll umsetzte in ihr literarisches Werk. Mit großem Feingefühl geht die Autorin den wichtigsten Beziehungen in Virginia Woolfs Leben - zu ihrer Schwester Vanessa, zu ihrem Mann Leonard, zu Vita Sackville-West - nach und definiert sie anders, als man es bisher gewohnt war. Hermione Lee widmet sich ihrem Gegenstand mit leidenschaftlichem Interesse und genauester Kenntnis. Sie kommt zu überraschenden Ergebnissen und präsentiert sie mit schriftstellerischem Glanz.

Der gesundheitliche Zusammenbruch des Vaters beendet die kindliche Idylle, als Elizabeth Bowen sieben Jahre alt ist. Mit ihrer Mutter geht sie nach England, wo die weitverzweigte Familie lebt, und sie von einer Villa zur anderen gereicht werden. Dieser vagabundierende Lebensstil ist die Basis vieler unsicherer Kindheiten, die Bowen in ihren Romanen beschreiben wird.§Nach Jahren im Internat, dem Schulabschluss und zwei Semestern Kunststudium entscheidet sich Elizabeth Bowen anders: sie will das literarische Leben in London "einfangen", wie sie es nennt, und beginnt mit dem Schreiben. Der literarische Erfolg kommt früh: der 1923 veröffentlichte Erzählungsband "Encounters" ist der Auftakt zu einer großen literarischen Karriere. Ihr Haus in London wird zum Treffpunkt der damaligen Schriftsteller-Szene.§Hermione Lee beschreibt das Leben Elizabeth Bowens und führt durch ihre Romane und Erzählungen: entstanden ist das umfassende Portrait einer großen Autorin des 20. Jahrhunderts, die es für Deutschland zu entdecken.

A perfect match of writer and subject, one of our most brilliant biographers explores the life of a towering literary figure with his cooperation and access to unseen material. Known for his narrative inventiveness and keen attention to language, Tom Stoppard deftly incorporates art, science, history, politics, and philosophy across various genres, including theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His acclaimed works, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, and Shakespeare in Love, continue to resonate with audiences. Stoppard's life is equally captivating; born in Czechoslovakia, he escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at eight. Forgoing university, he launched a remarkable career and formed friendships with a diverse array of notable figures, including Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, Stephen Spielberg, Mick Jagger, and Vaclav Havel. Identifying as a "bounced Czech," he was later surprised to discover his Jewish heritage and the relatives lost in the Holocaust—secrets his mother had kept from him. The biographer's in-depth analysis weaves Stoppard's life and work into a vivid, insightful portrait of an extraordinary man.

Intimate, perceptive, critically acute, funny, and moving, this biography explores the life of one of the finest English novelists of the last century, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000). A great writer who would never describe herself as such, her novels are short, spare masterpieces that are self-concealing and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower, was hailed as genius. Her early novels drew from personal experiences, such as a boat on the Thames in the 1960s and a failing bookshop in Suffolk, while her later works ventured into historical realms, including pre-Revolution Russia and post-war Italy. Fitzgerald's life mirrored the complexity of her fiction, spanning the twentieth century and shifting from a Bishop's Palace to a sinking barge, and from an intellectual family to hardship. First published at sixty and achieving fame at eighty, her story embodies lateness, patience, and a unique form of heroism. Despite being loved and admired, she remained mysterious, often presenting herself as an absent-minded old lady, concealing a sharp intellect and a rich imagination. This brilliant account, penned by a biographer Fitzgerald admired, delves into her life, writing, and enigmatic self with fascination.

A Passionate Apprentice comprises the first years of Virginia Woolf's Journal - from 1879 to 1909. Beginning in early January, when Woolf was almost fifteen, the pages open at a time when she was slowly recovering from a period of madness following her mother's death in May 1895. Between this January and the autumn of 1904, Woolf would suffer the deaths of her half-sister and of her father, and survive a summer of madness and suicidal depression. Behind the loss and confusion, however, and always near the surface of her writing is a constructive force at work - a powerful impulse towards health. It was an urge, through writing, to bring order and continuity out of chaos. Putting things into words and giving them deliberate expression had the effect of restoring reality to much that might otherwise have remained insubstantial. This early chronicle represents the beginning of the future Virginia Woolf's apprenticeship as a novelist. These pages show that rare instance when a writer of great importance leaves behind not only the actual documents of an apprenticeship, but also a biographical record of that momentous period as well. In Woolf's words, 'Here is a volume of fairly acute life (the first really lived year of my life).'

Shot through with Stoppard's voice, and illuminating all his plays, Lee's gripping narrative draws on unprecedented access to archive material, interviews and long conversations with Stoppard himself.

Designed for both general readers and students of English literature at all levels, this edition of Trollope's novel contains an introduction, notes and comments on the text.

Biographer Lee gives us a new Edith Wharton--tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. She developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton's life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: houses and gardens, relief efforts during the Great War, and the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and childless, her one brush with passion came and went in midlife, an affair intimately recounted here. Lee interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age.--From publisher description

A selection from the GOLDEN TREASURY, which has remained the most famous poetry anthology since publication in 1861