Miranda Seymour

"Mary Shelley is the definitive account of the gifted and tragic author whose escape to France at seventeen with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley caused great scandal in London and permanently scarred her reputation. The couple traveled, with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont in tow, from France to Italy and Switzerland. In the summer of 1816 they rented a villa near Lord Byron's on Lake Geneva where, on a famous night of eerie thunderstorms,...

"A masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew: Lord Byron."--Amazon 1815. Annabella Milbanke married the notorious Lord Byron. Just one year later she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged...

A biography of Ottoline Morrell, patron of an early 20th century British salon that included Viginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, D.H. Lawrence, Siegfriend Sassoon, Augustus John, and Bertrand Russell.

James's character was full of contradictions. He was witty and melancholy, formidable and vulnerable, suavely brutal and imperiously kind. He was fiercely private and exuberantly sociable, guarded in many of his friendships, overt and demonstrative in his passions. Drawing on new material and using new illustrations, Miranda Seymour has recreated the last twenty years of James's life in England, when he became master of Lamb House in Rye and the focal...

Perhaps the finest love poet of our age, Robert Graves was also a man of strong opinions and stronger passions whose long life was one of extremes and contradictions. Profligate in his emotions but painstaking in his art, arrogant and pugnacious with enemies but generous and sustaining to friends, impulsive in love but careless of family: Graves bestrode the century, leaving controversy and scandal in his wake. Leaving as well the fruits of his remarkable...