David Cecil – författare

Jane Austen collected her childhood writings into three manuscript notebooks, both as a record of her earliest work and for the convenience of reading aloud to her family and friends. Volume the First (as she entitled it) contains fourteen pieces - literary skits and family jokes - dating from about 1787, when she was eleven, to 1793. Amusing in themselves, they give us a direct picture of the lively literary and family milieu in which the novelist's juvenilia was formed. This new edtion carries a Foreword by Lord David Cecil, a former president of the Jane Austen Society and Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. There is also a Publisher's Preface by Brian Southam, author of Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts and other works on Jane Austen.

The two quiet lives are Dorothy Osborne, writer of the famous love letters to William Temple, and Thomas Gray, poet, Cambridge don and friend of Horace Walpole. They lived a century apart, but as David Cecil shows, were temperamentally akin. Both were reserved, introspective and prone to melancholy: both appeared awkward and difficult save to the few to whom they opened their hearts: both commanded a fund of humour and imagination and possessed an instinctive feeling for style: and both enjoyed an inner life which was vivid, strong and exciting.David Cecil's subtle and sympathetic study of two remarkable natures is a sustained piece of exquisite scholarship which reads as engagingly now as it did when first published in 1948.

Max Beerbohm is one of those figures, like Dr Johnson and Oscar Wilde, as well known as a personality as he is an artist. He was a superb parodist and cartoonist, and he was the leading wit and dandy of the Edwardian age. His very first book was boldly entitled The Works of Max Beerbohm (a collection of seven essays). He wrote mainly in miniature forms but his most famous work is his only novel Zuleika Dobson, a comic fantasy about undergraduate life at Oxford in the 1890s. David Cecil was appointed by Max Beerbohm to be his biographer. The choice could not have been more apt. Granted access to his private papers, David Cecil provides an intimate portrait of an odd, brilliant and most lovable human being, who was also a deeper and more considerable character than his façade betrayed. Besides being a picture of a man, this book is the picture of an age. In it the literary, theatrical and fashionable worlds of the 1890s and of Edward VII's reign appear in vivid detail as seen through the amused but penetrating eyes of Max: he knew everyone worth knowing in that era and had something to say about each of them.'He has assembled all the available facts in a way to leave us grateful.' Evelyn Waugh, Sunday Times 'Here, exhibiting a small, delightful talent, is a large delightful book.' J. I. M. Stewart, Listener

First published in 1929, The Stricken Deer was the winner of that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize and also the Hawthornden Prize: it was David Cecil's first book.For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil's biography doesn't celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper's own words, 'the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.' Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression. His personal tragedy however enriched English literature: the fear of madness made him turn to writing poetry as a form of mental discipline, and isolation for the great world and from his own kind helped him to become the most enchanting of letter-writers. 'This is a sympathetic and vivid biography; it is subtle with a kind of gentle acuteness and vivid without literary ostentation. It is the work of a biographer with a clear head and a clever heart ... the rarest of all merits is the sensitive fairness of the of the biographer's estimate of character and situation throughout.' Desmond MacCarthy, Sunday Times

An eminent literary biographer and critic shows how poetry enriched the art of two representative English Romantic paintersIn Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil evokes the century of the poet-painter, when painting drew much of its inspiration from imaginative literature. Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), an unworldly visionary, obscure in his lifetime but now a recognized master, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), the Pre-Raphaelite daydreamer, once revered as a great painter but later admired chiefly for his work in applied art, emerge as artists who turned to their own inner lives to interpret Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.

Originally published in 1935, this volume contains the text of the Leslie Stephen Lecture for that year, delivered by Lord David Cecil at the University of Cambridge. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Jane Austen's life, career and characters.

Modern Library’s 100th best non-fiction book of all time, and John F. Kennedy’s favourite book.A masterful biography of the life of Lord Melbourne – Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister and devoted mentor, and one of England’s most controversial statesmen – whose turbulent marriage to Lady Caroline Lamb was one of the greatest scandals of the era. A charming, curious and altogether idiosyncratic figure, Melbourne is the perfect subject for a biography and David Cecil – with his elegant, thoughtful style and perfect scholarship – was his ideal biographer. The resulting work is a true classic of the genre and remains the most important and comprehensive account of Britain’s most beguiling and individual Prime Minister.This volume contains the entirety of David Cecil's two seminal biographies of Lord Melbourne - The Young Melbourne and Lord M - in one definitive book. “A superb work of art” – Harold Nicholson“A historian of the heart” – L. P. Hartley