This new biography explores the forces that shaped the interior life of one of the most beloved novelists in the English language. Each chapter begins by evoking an object that conjures up a key moment or theme in Austen's life and work. The woman who emerges is far tougher, more socially and politically aware, and altogether more modern than the conventional picture. The book looks at the biographical influences on her work, as well as her boundless...

As she falls in love with an American writer and finds herself facing insanity, Anna attempts to weave the diverse experiences of her life into one story.

Draws from over five thousand previously unpublished letters, notes, and documents to reveal the personal and literary life of the notoriously private writer.

"Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why--despite all the evidence to the...

"Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction-above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea-that has a passionate following today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica,...

The year is 1795 and Jane Austen is a feisty 20-year-old. The emerging writer already sees a world beyond class and commerce, pride and prejudice, and dreams of doing what was then nearly unthinkable--marrying for love. Her parents prefer a wealthy husband, to assure their daughter's future social standing, and are eyeing Mr. Wisley, nephew to the very rich and very formidable Lady Gresham, as a prospective match. But when Jane meets the roguish and...