Katherine Bucknell – författare

An engrossing new biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. From the editor of Isherwood’s diaries and letters.Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born to and set out to make a different one. Heir to an English estate, he flunked out of university, moved to Berlin, was driven through Europe by the Nazis, and circled the globe before finally settling in Hollywood. There he adopted a new religion and continued to form the friendships – including an astounding number of romantic and sexual ones, often with other celebrated artists – through which he discovered himself.Isherwood repeatedly fictionalised his friends and himself – from the detached ‘Christopher Isherwood’ of Goodbye to Berlin to George, the unapologetic middle-aged lover of men, in A Single Man, and the boldly out narrator of Christopher and His Kind. He was determined to portray his milieu appealingly to mainstream audiences in lucid, entertaining, often hilarious prose. Frankness about his sexuality, political beliefs and religion made him both a figurehead for the left and a target for the right. All the while, among the many public, constructed selves, an inmost self remained hidden.Using a wealth of unpublished material, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out reveals the drama and complexity of Isherwood’s interior world. It tells how the traumas of his father’s death in World War I and his failure to protect his German lover from the Nazis were healed by his life as a monk in the 1940s, enabling him to commit unflinchingly to a sexually open relationship in the 1950s, and to come out as a ‘grand old man’ of the gay rights movement in the 1970s.With this new biography, enriched by unlimited access to Isherwood’s partner Don Bachardy, Katherine Bucknell shows how Christopher Isherwood achieved a uniquely inspiring personal life. He effected lasting change in our culture, through both his literary works and the way he lived.

An intimate portrait of London intellectual life, the breakdown of a marriage and the friendship between two women, ‘What You Will’ draws the reader into a spellbinding world of beauty and tension.Gwen, an American painter, lives in London with her English husband, Lawrence, an Oxford don. When Gwen’s friend Hilary arrives from New York bruised by a broken engagement, a lost job and an unsuitable love affair, Gwen is determined to find her someone to marry. But will he be another Oxford intellectual, a member of London's bohemia, or a professional from the scandal-ridden New York museum world?But with Gwen’s arrival the bonds of friendship, love, and marriage are severely tested. Pressure builds in the household, affecting Gwen and Lawrence’s small son as he struggles to engage with the sophistication and savagery around him.Tackling deep and unsetttling questions – Are we slaves to our impulses or to one another? Is it possible to have both love and freedom? Can the artist or the intellectual illuminate such questions?, ‘What You Will’ is a subtly wrought, multi-layered, and hypnotically suspenseful tale about how we handle our most intimate relationships.

The second volume in the Auden Studies Series, The Language of Learning and the Language of Love considers Auden primarily during the first decade of his literary career as a public figure as well as private man. It includes previously unpublished poems, prose, and letters by Auden - each with a scholarly introduction and full annotation - which reveal how the well-known poet, teacher, dramatist, and sage battled with his literary ancestors, experienced love, and devised a rhetoric to express both homosexual feelings and artistic impulses.Contributions to this volume include poems, songs, and a piece of early travel writing introduced by Auden's new biographer, the historian Richard Davenport-Hines. Lyrics offered to Benjamin Britten as cabaret songs are presented by Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed, and Nicholas Jenkins. Also in the volume is a fascinating array of essays about Auden by leading scholars in the field, including Stan Smith and Katherine Bucknell, and the German scholar and close friend of Auden, David Luke. A further Supplement to B.C. Bloomfield's magisterial Auden Bibliography of 1972 is supplied by Edward Mendelson.

This is the first volume in a new series on the work of the poet W. H. Auden. The volume contains a large amount of Unpublished material by Auden, notably six poems written in German in the early 1930s, translated here by the poet and scholar David Constantine, as well as the complete version of the important early essay, `Writing', with a new foreword by its original editor Naomi Mitchison. There are substantial selections from Auden's letters to Stephen Spender and to E. R. Dodds and Mrs Dodds: these are the first Auden letters to receive a scholarly presentation with full annotation. Also in the volume are essays about Auden and his mentors and contemporaries, by leading scholars in the field such as Valentine Cunningham, John Fuller, Julian Symons, and Stan Smith, as well as by outstanding newcomers. For bibliophiles, there is advice on collecting Auden's works, and Edward Mendelson has contributed a Supplement to his comprehensive W. H. Auden: A Bibliography, 1924-1969.

The third volume of Auden Studeis presents Auden in maturity, and includes a large amount of previously unpublished prose by him. The book concentrates on the relatively unexplored area of Auden's post-1940 writings, and the letters, essay, and lectures printed here demonstrate the Goethean scope of his intellect, which ranged easily from psychoanalysis to theology, archaeology to politics.In Solitude, for Company contains two hitherto unpublished and little-known lectures. The first of these, introduced by Nicholas Jenkins, is on the theme of vocation, delivered during the troubled war years when Auden was examining his own vocation. The second lecture was given near the end of the poet's life, on the subject of the value of the work of Sigmund Freud. Katherine Bucknell precedes this with the first full-length examination of Auden's intensely ambivalent relation to Freud. Auden's correspondence with his close friends James and Tania Stern reveals much new and important biographical information, and Edward Mendelson's further supplement to the Auden Bibliography provides an extensive listing of all published letters by Auden. In addition, distinguished literary critics, including David Bromwich, Lawrence Lipking, Edna Longley, and Michael Wood, together with the nonagenarian communist Edward Upward, contribute to a symposium on one of this century's most famous poems, 'In Praise of Limestone'.

You know the terror that for poets lurks Beyond the ferry when to Minos brought. Poets must utter their Collected Works, Including Juvenilia...--from "Letter to Lord Byron" (1936) Regardless of how poets feel about their youthful attempts at verse, their early poems not only enrich our understanding of their artistic growth, but also reveal much about the nature of literary genius. No other twentieth-century poet has left behind such a wealth of early poetry as did W. H. Auden. By bringing together for the first time all the poems written by Auden between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one (1922-1928), this book allows us a rare, detailed look at the literary personality, development, and preoccupations of a major poet. Auden's readers will be fascinated to find in these poems the earliest evidence of his interest in psychoanalysis, his conflicted attitude toward his homosexuality, his self-conscious approach to poetry, and his life-long journey toward a religious sense of the world. This collection includes over two hundred poems, most of them never published before, concluding with the contents of Auden's privately printed volume, Poems (1928).The poems are generously annotated with information on Auden's education, reading, literary concerns, and personal life. In her introduction, Katherine Bucknell traces important themes relating to the poet's entire career, and describes crucial but hitherto unknown aspects of his youth during his years at Gresham's School and at Christ Church, Oxford. Throughout this work we see in Auden an admirable instinct for experiment, a thorough testing of tradition, and a gathering mastery of technique and thematic argument.

'A first-rate biography of the man, the writer and the lover' DAVID HOCKNEY'Bucknell's research is impressive and her judgements astute' GUARDIANAn engrossing new biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. From the editor of Isherwood’s diaries and letters.Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born to and set out to make a different one. Heir to an English estate, he flunked out of university, moved to Berlin, was driven through Europe by the Nazis, and circled the globe before settling in Hollywood.There he adopted a new religion and continued to form the friendships – including an astounding number of romantic and sexual ones – through which he discovered himself.Using a wealth of unpublished material, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out tells how the traumas of his father’s death in World War I and his failure to protect his German lover from the Nazis were healed by his life as a monk in the 1940s, enabling him to commit unflinchingly to a sexually open relationship in the 1950s, and to come out as a ‘grand old man’ of the gay rights movement in the 1970s.With this new biography, enriched by unlimited access to Isherwood’s partner Don Bachardy, Katherine Bucknell shows how Christopher Isherwood achieved a uniquely inspiring personal life. He effected lasting change in our culture, through both his literary works and the way he lived.‘The best biography I’ve ever read . . . Every page is full of surprises’ EDMUND WHITE'It’s hard to imagine a better qualified candidate for this task than Katherine Bucknell' THE TIMES'A fast-paced story of an extraordinary life and a broadly illuminating history of vast cultural changes’ EDWARD MENDELSON