Most Popular Books by Victoria Glendinning

Award-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning draws on her deep knowledge of the twentieth century literary scene, and on her meticulous research into previously untapped sources, to write the first full biography of the extraordinary man who was the "dark star" at the center of the Bloomsbury set, and the definitive portrait of the Woolf marriage. A man of extremes, Leonard Woolf was ferocious and tender, violent and self-restrained, opinionated and nonjudgmental, always an outsider of sorts within the exceptionally intimate, fractious, and sometimes vicious society of brilliant but troubled friends and lovers. He has been portrayed either as Virginia''s saintly caretaker or as her oppressor, the substantial range and influence of his own achievements overshadowed by Virginia''s fame and the tragedy of her suicide. But Leonard was a pivotal figure of his age, whose fierce intelligence touched the key literary and political events that shaped the early decades of the twentieth century and would resonate into the post-World War II era. Glendinning beautifully evokes Woolf ''s coming-of-age in turn-of-the-century London. The scholarship boy from a prosperous Jewish family would cut his own path through the world of the British public school, contending with the lingering anti-Semitism of Imperial Age Britain. Immediately upon entering Trinity College, Cambridge, Woolf became one of an intimate group of vivid personalities who would form the core of the Bloomsbury circle: the flamboyant Lytton Strachey; Toby Stephen, "the Goth," through whom Leonard would meet Stephen''s sister Virginia; and Clive Bell. Glendinning brings to life their long nights of intense discussion of literature and the vicissitudes of sex, and charts Leonard''s course as he becomes the lifelong friend of John Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster. She unearths the crucial influence of Woolf ''s seven years as a headstrong administrator in colonial Ceylon, where he lost confidence in the imperial mission, deciding to abandon Ceylon in order to marry the psychologically troubled Virginia Stephen. Glendinning limns the true nature of Leonard''s devotion to Virginia, revealing through vivid depiction of their unconventional marriage how Leonard supported Virginia through her breakdowns and in her writing. In co-founding with Virginia the Hogarth Press, he provided a secure publisher for Virginia''s own boldly experimental works. As the éminence grise of the early Labour Party, working behind the scenes,Woolf became a leading critic of imperialism, and his passionate advocacy of collective security to prevent war underpinned the charter of the League of Nations. After Virginia''s death, he continued to forge his own iconoclastic way, engaging in a long and happy relationship with a married woman. Victoria Glendinning''s Leonard Woolf is a major achievement -- a shrewdly perceptive and lively portrait of a complex man of extremes and contradictions in whom passion fought with reason and whose far-reaching influence is long overdue for the full appreciation Glendinning offers in this important book.

Sackville-West was an English author, poet and gardener. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her affair with the novelist Virginia Woolf, and Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which she and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, created at their estate.

Victoria Glendinning provides a woman''s view of Anthony Trollope, placing emphasis on family, particularly on his relationship with his mother. But it is Anthony as a husband and lover that intrigues her most. She looks at the nature of his love for his wife, Rose and at his love for Kate Field.

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the charismatic and persuasive founder of Singapore and Governor of Java. An English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, zoologist and civil servant, he carved an extraordinary (though brief) life for himself in South East Asia. The tropical, disease-ridden settings of his story are as dramatic as his own trajectory - an obscure young man with no advantages other than talent and obsessive drive, who changed history by establishing - without authority - on the wretchedly unpromising island of Singapore, a settlement which has become a world city. After a turbulent time in the East Indies, Raffles returned to the UK and turned to his other great interests - botany and zoology. He founded London Zoo in 1826, the year of his death.Raffles remains a controversial figure, and in the first biography for over forty years, Victoria Glendinning charts his prodigious rise within the social and historical contexts of his world. His domestic and personal life was vivid and shot through with tragedy. His own end was sad, though his fame immortal.

From the award-winning author of Electricity - an absorbing and finely-drawn tale of professional and personal romance in modern Europe. Martagon, a young and talented engineer and a loner by nature, has devoted his life to his career -- occasionally, and regretfully, sacrificing friendship and family for professional success. He accepts a position masterminding the construction of new, high-tech airport in France, applying his cutting-edge expertise to build it almost entirely of glass. The land and vineyards on which the airport will be built belonged to a feuding brother and sister. It is Marina, the beautiful, flamboyant, and completely irresistible sister, with whom Martagon falls in love for the first time in his life. The detached and rational engineer is thrown completely off balance, begins questioning the ambitions he once took for granted. He takes risks to be with Marina, compromises himself -- professionally and emotionally -- a mistake that could cost him everything he has struggled to achieve. Written with unusual urgency and perception about the relations between men and women, Victoria Glendinning''s Flight is a story of passionate love, morality, self-discovery, professional ethics -- of what happens when solid ground disappears from below, and the only options left are to either soar or fall.

A woman in Tudor England fends for herself after Henry VIII closes her abbey in this historical novel perfect for fans of Wolf Hall and Philippa Gregory. In 1535, England is hardly a wellspring of gender equality; it is a grim and oppressive age where women―even the privileged few who can read and write―have little independence. In The Butcher’s Daughter, it is this milieu that mandates Agnes Peppin, daughter of a simple country butcher, to leave her family home in disgrace and live out her days cloistered behind the walls of the Shaftesbury Abbey. But with her great intellect, she becomes the assistant to the Abbess and as a result integrates herself into the unstable royal landscape of King Henry VIII. As Agnes grapples with the complex rules and hierarchies of her new life, King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself the new head of the Church. Religious houses are being formally subjugated, monasteries dissolved, and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. The cosseted world in which Agnes has carved out for herself a sliver of liberty is shattered. Now, free at last to be the master of her own fate, she descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive by any means necessary . . . The Butcher’s Daughter is the riveting story of a young woman facing head-on the obstacles carefully constructed against her sex. This dark and affecting novel by award-winning author Victoria Glendinning intricately depicts the lives of women in the sixteenth century in a world dominated by men. “A fresh perspective [of the Tudor Era]. . . . Glendinning’s research convincingly depicts the bustling and frequently ruthless world of Henry VIII’s England.” —Library Journal “Psychologically astute . . . and evincing deep knowledge of Tudor-era society. Glendinning thoughtfully explores womanhood’s many facets.” —Booklist “Unabashedly feminist . . . elegant, intelligent, compulsively entertaining. . . . [The Butcher’s Daughter] demonstrates the power of individuals with inner strength and determination to work for change when able to choose a life of their own design.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

Traces the sexual and intellectual awakening of a Victorian Englishwoman, who marries an electrical engineer and becomes caught up in the excitement of the new science and the charms of a country aristocrat.

Discusses the life of the Anglo-Irish novelist from her childhood to her Oxford years, from her achievements as a novelist to her conversations with literary friends. -- Dust jacket.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is an inexhaustibly intriguing figure in literary and political history. He was an ordained clergyman whose enemies thought he did not believe in God. He became a legendary Dean of St. Patrick''s Cathedral in Dublin, and for four intoxicating years he was the intimate of Queen Anne''s chief ministers, acting as their publicist and propagandist. His private life was intense and enigmatic. Two younger women, whom he called Stella and Vanessa, moved to Ireland to be close to him. He made both of them unhappy. Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer, and wit, Swift was the master of shock. His furious satirical responses to the corruption and hypocrisy he saw around him in private and public life have every relevance for our own times. Like his Gulliver in the land of Lilliput, Swift is a problem in perspective and scale. In this entertaining biography, Glendinning takes a literary zoom lens to illuminate this proud and intractable man.

Celebrated novelist, acerbic critic, and journalist without peer, friend and lover of the great and gifted, social and sexual rebel, observer of modern history''s turning points, Rebecca West led one of the great lives of the twentieth century. In this first full-scale biography of Rebecca West, the widely admired biographer Victoria Glendinning captures that life in all its disturbing brilliance and haunting pain.

Biography of English writer Anthony Trollope concentrating on his relationships with his mother, other family members, and his wife.

A wickedly entertaining novel that creates a portrait of a selfish, irresistibly attractive literary lion and of the world of the intellectually elite in which he performs.

Freed from her unhappy homelife, Edith Sitwell set up home in a shabby London flat: she became one of the best-known 1920s pioneering poets. Victoria Glendinning presents a biography of a woman known for her eccentricity and gothic appearance.

Biography of Winnie Seebohm.

From Victoria Glendinning, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and (twice) the Whitbread Prize for Biography. ''It''s Succession in tailcoats and spats ... This is a vivid and eye-opening group biography, backgrounded by the rise of supermarket moguls from humble beginnings'' Sunday Times Who was John Lewis? What story lies behind the retail empire that bears his name? Behind the glass windows and displays of soft furnishing, this book reveals the family that founded the shops in all their eccentricities, and whose relationships became blighted by conflicts of epic proportions as their wealth bloomed. Born into poverty, John Lewis was orphaned at the age of seven when his father died in a Somerset workhouse. Dreaming of a better life, the young man travelled to London at the start of what would become a retail revolution. From early years as a draper''s apprentice, we see how Lewis''s first pokey little business opened on Oxford Street in 1864, and expanded as an emerging middle class embraced the department stores as a recreational experience. Prize-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning has had full access to the company and family archives to write this eye-opening story. She captures the toxic relationships that unfolded between Lewis and his two sons, Spedan and Oswald, as they collided over the future of their retail empire - their worst moments including emotional blackmail, face-slapping and a kidnapping - and much litigation between father and both sons. Yet the family never broke up and Spedan''s vision of a Partnership model to act as an ethical corrective and foster a community of happier, more productive workers was eventually realised and survives to this day. With riveting personal detail, this brilliant group biography captures a rags-to-riches story and a tempestuous family saga, all unfolding against the dramatic social and political worlds of nineteenth-century London. The book concludes with an assessment of the position John Lewis holds in British sensibilities, and whether John Lewis and institutions like it have a place in our future.

The Devil’s Pool is one of a group of pastoral novels inspired by the countryside of Nohant in Berry, where George Sand grew up. These novels are simple stories of country life, in which Sand records local customs and manners, depicting a timeless idyll, unaffected by the outside world and the political events of the time. With his wife dead and three young children to raise, ploughman Germaine decides that the time has come to marry again. He embarks on a journey to meet a rich widow, Catherine Leonard, in a match that has been approved by his father-in-law; however, he finds her proud and vain and surrounded by other suitors. Germaine prefers the company of Marie, a young shepherdess from his own village, but she is insistent that she wants a younger, more suitable husband. Influential French author George Sand is best known for two groups of novels: a series of romantic tales and a collection of country-life idylls.