Victoria Glendinning Livres

Londres années 1880. Charlotte n'a pas vingt ans quand ses parents, un couple étriqué de la petite bourgeoisie anglaise, accueillent un locataire du nom de Peter Fisher, jeune ingénieur, apôtre de la toute nouvelle science de l'électricité. Avec lui, Charlotte plonge d'un coup dans la modernité et, par son mariage, échappe à l'atmosphère étouffante de la maison familiale. Mais c'est auprès de lord Godwin, un aristocrate excentrique, qu'elle découvre les plaisirs et les tourments de la passion. Initiée, lors d'une soirée chez lui, au spiritisme, qui fait fureur à l'époque, elle exploitera son "don" à Londres, où, poussée par la nécessité, elle s'installera bientôt comme médium...

Anthony Trollope is, with Dickens, perhaps the most enduringly popular Victorian novelist. Born in 1815, he initially made his living working for the Post Office, and introduced the pillar box into Britain. He was also an enthusiastic rider to hounds, a Liberal parliamentary candidate, a magazine editor, a traveller, the devoted friend of Thackeray and George Eliot and the author of over 60 books and a vast amount of journalism. This book explores Trollope's private life - his unhappy childhood, his relationships with his wife and a beautiful American, Kate Fielding - while creating a picture of the times in which he lived.

The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her passionate affair with the novelist Virginia Woolf, and Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which she and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, created at their estate. This is her biography.

The biography delves into the life of Leonard Woolf, highlighting his role as a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group and his relationship with Virginia Woolf. Through meticulous research and new insights, the author explores his contributions to literature and thought during early 20th-century Britain. The inclusion of photographs enriches the narrative, offering a visual connection to Woolf's experiences and the vibrant cultural milieu he was part of.

By the time of his death, Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the founder of Singapore and Governor of Java, having left school in his early teens to become a clerk for the British East India Company. Charismatic and daring, Raffles forged an extraordinary path for himself in South East Asia - refusing to be satisfied with the trading posts available to the British, he defied Dutch governors and wrangled with warring local rulers to establish what is now a world city. An ardent linguist and zoologist, Raffles spoke fluent Malay and found time to write The History of Java, as well as naming several species of flora and fauna he discovered on his travels. He founded London Zoo and promoted the study of Malay alongside European languages in Southeast Asia.Raffles remains a controversial figure - a utopian imperialist, disobedient employee and knight of the realm who died deeply in debt, predeceased by all but one of his children. He built racial segregation into his urban planning, but was also a staunch abolitionist. Renowned biographer Victoria Glendinning charts Raffles' prodigious rise in this new edition, specially updated for the bicentenary of the foundation of Singapore in 1819. His life was short, complicated and shot through with tragedy, but Raffles' fame lives on.

Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer and wit, Swift is best known as the author of "Gulliver's Travels". In this biography, Victoria Glendinning investigates the main events and relationships of Swift's life and provides a portrait set in a tapestry of controversy and paradox.

Presents a detailed biography of Dame Edith Sitwell, the iconoclastic and complex English poet, discussing the life and literary career of an eccentric and contradictory woman

"I always wanted everything so frantically, and I'm just the person that can't have them.' Based on family papers and memories, this picture of middle class life at the end of the nineteenth century tells the poignant story of Winnie Seebohm, Victoria Glendinning's great-aunt, who in 1885 was one of the early students at Newnham College, Cambridge. Though much loved by her family, Winnie was stifled in her desire for life and died at the age of twenty-two.

Lady Slane, veuve à 88 ans d'un aristocrate éminent, décide d'entamer une nouvelle vie. Elle déjoue obligations familiales et contingences matérielles, s'accordant in extremis une petite part de liberté et d'épanouissement personnel, en la personne de Fitzgeorge, très vieux collectionneur d'art célibataire, qu'elle a brièvement connu dans sa jeunesse et qui sera le complice de ses derniers jours, l'amant de coeur qu'elle a toujours rêvé d'avoir.