The Victorian Poet Who Sought to Capture Everyday Life in Her Verse nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lionel Shriver Warns Readers Not to Meet Their Favorite Authors
Credit.Rebecca Clarke
May 27, 2021
“The warts-and-all version is almost always a disappointment, and they risk a retroactive taint,” says the novelist, whose forthcoming book is “Should We Stay or Should We Go.”
What books are on your night stand?
Two books to prime for my next novel: Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” and Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” One exercise in reverse research writing the novel first and then doing the homework: Katie Engelhart’s “The Inevitable,” about end-of-life suicide. Finally, mercifully, fiction: Ewan Morrison’s “How to Survive Everything,” which sounds like an antidote to the Engelhart.
On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna s mother disappears into the fog. That same morning, a spy case breaks in the news. Obsessed by stories of espionage, Anna s brother Peter begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was an undercover spy and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort fact from fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life? And how do you know who a person was once she is dead? synopsis may belong to another edition of this title.
Review: It is the calm quietness of her writing that is so appealing - she lays an image down so gently that it floats in the mind long after Margaret Forster Harding skilfully weaves together history, memory and imagination in this haunting and beautifully written novel about how, chameleon-like, we construct our own identities Daily Mail Elegant and intelligent . Should confirm her reputation as a writer of unusual and persuasive talent
Last modified on Thu 25 Feb 2021 08.23 EST
âHow do I love thee? Let me count the ways,â asked Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1850, unwittingly turning herself from one of Britainâs pre-eminent poets into a Valentineâs card fixture. It wasnât just the words, which are still lovely, but the way they tend to be read in conjunction with the story of her clandestine courtship by fellow-poet Robert Browning. In 1846, after a year and a half of epistolary romance and secret meetings, young Browning famously burst into the 40-year-oldâs London sickroom and whisked her to Italy and a new life of sunshine, sex and lyric poetry.