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Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means: A Biography

Autor Brendan King
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 12 iul 2017
Dame Beryl Bainbridge was one of the most popular and recognisable English novelists of her generation.She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, and her critically acclaimed novels The Dressmaker (1973), The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), An Awfully Big Adventure (1990), Every Man For Himself (1996) and Master Georgie (1998), confirmed her status as one of the major literary figures of the past fifty years.A unique voice in fiction, and unforgettable in person, Beryl Bainbridge was famous for her gregarious drinking habits and her unconventional lifestyle. Yet underneath the public image of a quirky eccentric lay a complex and sometimes traumatic private life that she rarely talked about and which was often only hinted at in her novels.In this first full-length biography, Brendan King draws on a mass of unpublished letters and diaries to reveal the real woman behind the popular image. He explores Bainbridge's difficult childhood in Formby, her career as a young actress at the Liverpool Playhouse, and her life as a single mother and writer in Camden Town. Along the way he tackles her complex private life: her failed marriage to the painter Austin Davies, her affairs, and her longstanding relationship with her publisher, Colin Haycraft.This frank portrait of Beryl Bainbridge tells the story of a life that is every bit as dramatic and compelling as one of her own perfectly-crafted novels.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781472947338
ISBN-10: 1472947339
Pagini: 576
Ilustrații: 2x8pp B&W plate sections
Dimensiuni: 129 x 198 x 39 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Bloomsbury Publishing
Colecția Bloomsbury Continuum
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom

Caracteristici

Reveals startling new information about Bainbridge's lovers, including her publisher Colin Haycraft, and the circumstances surrounding Austin Davies's (Beryl's one-time husband), brief relationship with Haycraft's wife the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis

Notă biografică

Brendan King is an author, editor and translator. Between 1987 and 2010 he worked for the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, and helped prepare her final novel The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress for publication after her death.

Cuprins

Note on the TextIntroduction1 Winnie and Dick2 Mummy and Daddy3 Education4 Us Versus Them5 Harry6 Tring7 The Playhouse8 Austin9 London10 Dundee11 Engagement12 Break13 Paris14 Married Life15 The Summer of the Tsar16 Separation17 I'm Not Criticising...I'm Remembering18 The Return of the Wild Colonial Boy19 A Knight in Tarnished Armour20 Basher's Progress21 Albert Street22 America23 Eaves Farm24 Bottle Factory25 Harriet Said26 Success27 The Writing Life28 Fact and Friction29 Goodbye Mr Chips30 Celebrity31 IllnessAfterwordNotesBibliographyAcknowledgementsIndex

Recenzii

Beryl Bainbridge: Love By All Sorts of Means by Brendan King completely gripped me. It made me intensely nostalgic for a time when literary life consisted mainly of drinking and f**king.
A first rate biography . King gets the tone absolutely right.
[A] superb first biography . Finishing this biography, we'll know quite enough to see for ourselves that the comical bizarreness of the masterly fiction had inspiration aplenty in the chaos, breakdowns and excesses of [Bainbridge's] daily existence.
This vivid biography details a complicated private life, from which emerged novels that rank as major achievements in English fiction . King, who worked as Bainbridge's assistant throughout the last 23 years of her life, weaves a gripping narrative . compassionate and authoritative.
[King] has had unlimited access to [Bainbridge's] huge collection of letters, diaries and journals ... I cannot think of another biography that plunders its subject's privacy to such an illuminating degree.
The biography of the year.
King is very good on Bainbridge's emotional life, aided by her prolific letters.
Conscientious . detailed . fair and kind . King, who worked with Bainbridge as an amanuensis for more than 20 years, notes how certain stories and characters from her life were threaded into her novels.
Sympathetic, even-handed and illuminating . The biography's most fascinating revelation is about Bainbridge's relationship with her publishers Colin and Anna Haycraft.
What King has achieved in this calm and careful biography is a portrait of Bainbridge's imagination. He tells the sequential story of her life and loves, but shows too how her creativity rebelled against the rules of linear time. She wrote and she painted so that what had happened would always be happening, fixed in a less transient frame than her own frail body.
I ended up reading it in the bath ... Brendan King, [Bainbridge's] long-standing amanuensis, has done her justice.
Astonishing . You have to laugh, or you'll cry. The best of Bainbridge's fiction - and this marvelous biography - invites us to do both.
Gripping
King, who was Bainbridge's assistant for the last 23 years of her life, writes authoritatively and objectively about her early acting career, her colorful and at times turbulent private life and, of course, her wonderful, memorable, bleakly comic novels.
A fair and conscientious account of the life of the British novelist, drawing on letters and diaries.
A naturally interesting biography
Will be of enormous help in enhancing the reader's appreciation of her multifarious output.
Mirroring [Bainbridge's] own darkly comic creations, King's biography contains more than enough disasters and triumphs to grip the reader from the beginning. Written with a detachment that never spills into hagiography, it is full of Will she? Won't she? It's behind you! moments, and is the perfect precursor to re-reading Bainbridge herself.
Absorbing ... an excellent gateway to her under-read corpus.