Laura Davies – författare

The empowering bestseller and self help guide for women survivors of child sexual abuse. Based on the experiences of hundreds of child abuse survivors, The Courage to Heal profiles victims who share the challenges and triumphs of their personal healing processes. The accessible and inspiring book offers hope, encouragement and practical advice to every woman who was sexually abused as a child and answers some vital questions, including: How do I know if I was sexually abused? Where does the decision to heal start? How can I break the silence and who will listen? How can I re-build my self-esteem, intimacy and capacity to love? What therapy, support groups, self-help programmes or organisations are available? Inspiring and comprehensive, The Courage to Heal offers mental, emotional and physical support to all people who are in the process of rebuilding their lives.

New Perspectives on The Spectator: Form, Style and Contexts offers a fresh approach to the much-referenced but rarely thoroughly read periodical The Spectator.Breaking free from the constraints of existing scholarly debates, which are dominated by issues of commercial and urban life and the emergence of the 'public sphere', this book brings to light previously unnoticed themes and features, building an alternative picture of the content, form, style, and significance of this influential work. It focuses on the essays authored by Joseph Addison, and develops a mode of immersed close reading to bring out hinterlands of thought concerned with forms of human experience, both interior and societal, that do not align with conventional evaluations of The Spectator as polite, rational and prescriptive. Each chapter draws on an extensive range of writing by Addison, including his prose and poetry beyond The Spectator, and examines a theme that appears distinctively and frequently across the hundreds of essays he contributed to both of its short-lived runs (1711–12 and 1714). These themes include blanks and blankness, secrets and lies, death and the afterlife, dreams and visions, and excess and waste. In this way, the book reimagines The Spectator's character as a literary text alongside its role in shaping the reading public of the early eighteenth century, and establishes a new framework for future scholarship across the multiple disciplines in which The Spectator remains a touchstone text.