Deirdre David – författare

Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is the first literary biography of the twentieth-century novelist Olivia Manning. It tells the story of a writer whose life and work were shaped by her own fierce ambition, and, like many of her generation, the events and aftermath of the Second World War. From the time she left Portsmouth for London in the mid-1930s determined to become a famous writer, through her wartime years in the Balkans and the Middle East, and until her death in London in 1980, Olivia Manning was a dedicated and hard-working author. Married to a British Council lecturer stationed in Bucharest, Olivia Manning arrived in Romania on the 3rd September 1939, the fateful day when Allied forces declared war on Germany. For the duration of World War Two, she kept one step ahead of invading German forces as she and her husband fled Romania for Greece, and then Greece for the Middle East, where they stayed until the end of the war. These tumultuous wartime years are the subject of her best-known and most transparently autobiographical novels, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy.Olivia Manning refused to be labelled a 'feminist,' but her novels depict with cutting insight and sardonic wit the marginal position of women striving for independent identity in arenas frequently controlled by men, whether on the frontlines of war or in the publishing world of the 1950s. However, she did not just write about World War Two and women's lives. Amongst other things, Manning published fiction about making do in Britain's post-war Age of Austerity, about desecration of the environment through uncontrolled development, and about the painful adjustment to post-war British life for young men. As the author of thirteen published novels, two volumes of short stories, several works of non-fiction, and a regular reviewer of contemporary fiction, she was a visible presence on the British literary scene throughout her life and her work provides a detailed insight into the period.Grounded in thorough research and enriched by discussion of previously unexamined manuscripts and letters, Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is a timely study of Olivia Manning's remarkable life. Deirdre David integrates incisive critical analysis of Manning's writing with extensive discussion of the historical contexts of her fiction.

Deirdre David traces the successful writing life of Pamela Hansford Johnson (1912-1981) from the time of her childhood growing up in a theatrical household in South London to her death as the widow of the novelist and popular intellectual C. P. Snow. Forced to leave school at sixteen, she trained as a shorthand typist, worked for four years in the mid 1930 for a West End Bank, and conducted a tumultuous romance with the then 19-year old poet Dylan Thomas. Thomas having persuaded her she would become a better novelist than a poet she published a scandalous first novel in 1935 and went on to publish close to thirty more in her career. A passionate defender of the narrative traditions of the British novel, she contributed many essays and reviews on contemporary fiction to periodicals and newspapers; in her own fiction, in the nineteenth-century traditions of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens, she focused on the domestic everyday, the moral questions facing a rapidly-changing society, and the challenges and pleasures of urban life. She was very much a novelist of the city, particularly London. She also gained praise and criticism for her writings about violence and pornography, especially in her well-known analysis of the notorious Moors murder trial. With C. P. Snow, she travelled many times to the United States and the Soviet Union and at the time of her death in 1981, she was still at work on her last novel. Hers was a rich, courageous, and politically committed writing life, and this biography restores Johnson's work to the critical distinction it received when it was published.

Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is the first literary biography of the twentieth-century novelist Olivia Manning. It tells the story of a writer whose life and work were shaped by her own fierce ambition, and, like many of her generation, the events and aftermath of the Second World War. From the time she left Portsmouth for London in the mid-1930s determined to become a famous writer, through her wartime years in the Balkans and the Middle East, and until her death in London in 1980, Olivia Manning was a dedicated and hard-working author. Married to a British Council lecturer stationed in Bucharest, Olivia Manning arrived in Romania on the 3rd September 1939, the fateful day when Allied forces declared war on Germany. For the duration of World War Two, she kept one step ahead of invading German forces as she and her husband fled Romania for Greece, and then Greece for the Middle East, where they stayed until the end of the war. These tumultuous wartime years are the subject of her best-known and most transparently autobiographical novels, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. Olivia Manning refused to be labelled a 'feminist,' but her novels depict with cutting insight and sardonic wit the marginal position of women striving for independent identity in arenas frequently controlled by men, whether on the frontlines of war or in the publishing world of the 1950s. However, she did not just write about World War Two and women's lives. Amongst other things, Manning published fiction about making do in Britain's post-war Age of Austerity, about desecration of the environment through uncontrolled development, and about the painful adjustment to post-war British life for young men. As the author of thirteen published novels, two volumes of short stories, several works of non-fiction, and a regular reviewer of contemporary fiction, she was a visible presence on the British literary scene throughout her life and her work provides a detailed insight into the period.Grounded in thorough research and enriched by discussion of previously unexamined manuscripts and letters, Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is a timely study of Olivia Manning's remarkable life. Deirdre David integrates incisive critical analysis of Manning's writing with extensive discussion of the historical contexts of her fiction.

-- Booklist

Examines the works of three Victorian writers, looks at the ways they subverted and affirmed their society, and discusses women's higher education in nineteenth century England.

In the Victorian period, the British novel reached a wide readership and played a major role in the shaping of national and individual identity. As we come to understand the ways the novel contributed to public opinion on religion, gender, sexuality and race, we continue to be entertained and enlightened by the works of Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope and many others. This second edition of the Companion to the Victorian Novel has been updated fully, taking account of new research and critical methodologies. There are four new chapters and the others have been thoroughly updated, as has the guide to further reading. Designed to appeal to students, teachers and readers, these essays reflect the latest approaches to reading and understanding Victorian fiction.

In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, first published in 2000, a series of specially-commissioned essays examine the work of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot and other canonical writers, as well as that of such writers as Olive Schreiner, Wilkie Collins and H. Rider Haggard, whose work has recently attracted new attention from scholars and students. The collection combines the literary study of the novel as a form with analysis of the material aspects of its readership and production, and a series of thematic and contextual perspectives that examine Victorian fiction in the light of social and cultural concerns relevant both to the period itself and to the direction of current literary and cultural studies. Contributors engage with topics such as industrial culture, religion and science and the broader issues of the politics of gender, sexuality and race. The Companion includes a chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, first published in 2000, a series of specially-commissioned essays examine the work of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot and other canonical writers, as well as that of such writers as Olive Schreiner, Wilkie Collins and H. Rider Haggard, whose work has recently attracted new attention from scholars and students. The collection combines the literary study of the novel as a form with analysis of the material aspects of its readership and production, and a series of thematic and contextual perspectives that examine Victorian fiction in the light of social and cultural concerns relevant both to the period itself and to the direction of current literary and cultural studies. Contributors engage with topics such as industrial culture, religion and science and the broader issues of the politics of gender, sexuality and race. The Companion includes a chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

Deirdre David here explores women's role in the literature of the colonial and imperial British nation, both as writers and as subjects of representation.David's inquiry juxtaposes the parliamentary speeches of Thomas Macaulay and the private letters of Emily Eden, a trial in Calcutta and the missionary literature of Victorian women, writing about thuggee and emigration to Australia. David shows how, in these texts and in novels such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, and H. Rider Haggard's She, the historical and symbolic roles of Victorian women were linked to the British enterprise abroad.Rule Britannia traces this connection from the early nineteenth-century nostalgia for masculine adventure to later patriarchal anxieties about female cultural assertiveness. Missionary, governess, and moral ideal, promoting sacrifice for the good of the empire—such figures come into sharp relief as David discusses debates over English education in India, class conflicts sparked by colonization, and patriarchal responses to fears about feminism and race degeneration. In conclusion, she reveals how Victorian women, as writers and symbols of colonization, served as critics of empire.

Deirdre David here explores women's role in the literature of the colonial and imperial British nation, both as writers and as subjects of representation.David's inquiry juxtaposes the parliamentary speeches of Thomas Macaulay and the private letters of Emily Eden, a trial in Calcutta and the missionary literature of Victorian women, writing about thuggee and emigration to Australia. David shows how, in these texts and in novels such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, and H. Rider Haggard's She, the historical and symbolic roles of Victorian women were linked to the British enterprise abroad.Rule Britannia traces this connection from the early nineteenth-century nostalgia for masculine adventure to later patriarchal anxieties about female cultural assertiveness. Missionary, governess, and moral ideal, promoting sacrifice for the good of the empire—such figures come into sharp relief as David discusses debates over English education in India, class conflicts sparked by colonization, and patriarchal responses to fears about feminism and race degeneration. In conclusion, she reveals how Victorian women, as writers and symbols of colonization, served as critics of empire.

A ForeWord magazine Book of the Year for 2007Charismatic, highly intelligent, and splendidly talented, Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was a Victorian celebrity, known on both sides of the Atlantic as an actress and member of the famous Kemble theatrical dynasty, as a fierce opponent of slavery despite her marriage to a wealthy slave owner, as a brilliantly successful solo performer of Shakespeare, and as the author of journals about her career and life on her husband's Georgia plantations. She was, in her own words, irresistible as a "woman who has sat at dinner alongside Byron . . . and who calls Tennyson, Alfred."Touring in America with her father in the early 1830s, Kemble impulsively wed the wealthy and charming Philadelphia bachelor Pierce Butler, beginning a tumultuous marriage that ended in a sensational divorce and custody battle fourteen years later. At the time of their marriage, Kemble had not yet visited the vast Georgia rice and cotton plantations to which Butler was heir. In the winter of 1838, they visited Butler's southern holdings, and a horrified Kemble wrote what would later be published on both sides of the Atlantic as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. An important text for abolitionists, it revealed the inner workings of a plantation and the appalling conditions in which slaves lived. Returning to England after her divorce, she fashioned a new career as a solo performer of Shakespeare's plays and as the author of memoirs, several travel narratives and collections of poems, a short novel, and miscellaneous essays on the theater. For the rest of her life, she would divide her time between the two countries.In the various roles she performed in her life, on stage and off-abolitionist, author, estranged wife-Kemble remained highly theatrical, appropriating and subverting nineteenth-century prescriptions for women's lives, ever rewriting the roles to which she was assigned by society and inheritance. Hers was truly a performed life, and in the first Kemble biography in twenty-five years to examine that life in its entirety, Deirdre David presents it in all its richness and complexity.