Paula Byrne – författare

‘Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously’ JILLY COOPER Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021 Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era’s own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer – one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart – so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love?Pym lived through extraordinary times. She attended Oxford in the thirties when women were the minority. She spent time in Nazi Germany, falling for a man who was close to Hitler. She made a career on the Home Front as a single working girl in London’s bedsit land. Through all of this, she wrote. Diaries, notes, letters, stories and more than a dozen novels – which as Byrne shows more often than not reflected the themes of Pym’s own experience: worlds of spinster sisters and academics in unrequited love, of powerful intimacies that pulled together seemingly humble lives.Paula Byrne’s new biography is the first to make full use of Barbara Pym’s archive. Brimming with new extracts from Pym’s diaries, letters and novels, this book is a joyous introduction to a woman who was herself the very best of company.Byrne brings Barbara Pym back to centre stage as one of the great English novelists: a generous, shrewdly perceptive writer and a brave woman, who only in the last years of her life was suddenly, resoundingly recognised for her genius.

A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England’s greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, ‘Brideshead Revisited’.Evelyn Waugh was already famous when ‘Brideshead Revisited’ was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, the novel was, he admitted, of no ‘immediate propaganda value’. Instead, it was the story of a household, a family and a journey of religious faith – an elegy, in many ways, for a vanishing world and a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier.The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous, eccentric and compelling as their counterparts in ‘Brideshead Revisited’. In this engrossing biography, Paula Byrne takes an innovative approach to her subject, setting out to capture Waugh through those friendships that mattered most to him. Far from the snobbish misanthropist of popular caricature, she uncovers a man as loving and complex as the family that inspired him – a family deeply traumatised when their father was revealed as a homosexual and forced to flee the country.This brilliantly original biography unlocks for the first time the extent to which Waugh’s great novel encoded and transformed his own experiences. In so doing, it illuminates the loves and obsessions that shaped his life, and brings us inevitably to a secret that dared not speak its name.

'I relished every page … This is the best book on Jane Austen I have ever read’Spectator 'Compelling … a delightful and engrossing book … Byrne’s passion is nothing if not persuasive’Sunday Times Was Jane Austen a woman of prim manners and genteel calm? Or someone who behaved outrageously, filled with sharp wit and wild comedy? Looking afresh at adaptations of Austen’s work – from the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice to Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility and the wildly successful Clueless – bestselling biographer Paula Byrne presents a bold new portrait of Austen as you’ve never seen her before. ‘A definitive and pioneering study of a wholly neglected aspect of Austen’s art' Michael Caines, TLS ‘Entertaining and engaging’Literary Review . . [Previously published as The Genius of Jane Austen]

Sex, fame and scandal in the theatrical, literary and social circles of late 18th-century England.One of the most flamboyant women of the late-eighteenth century, Mary Robinson’s life was marked by reversals of fortune. After being raised by a middle-class father, Mary was married, at age fourteen, to Thomas Robinson. His dissipated lifestyle landed the couple and their baby in debtors' prison, where Mary wrote her first book of poetry and met lifelong friend Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire.On her release, Mary quickly became one of the most popular actresses of the day, famously playing Perdita in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ for a rapt audience that included the Prince of Wales, who fell madly in love with her. She later used his copious love letters for blackmail.This authoritative and engaging book presents a fascinating portrait of a woman who was variously darling of the London stage, a poet whose work was admired by Coleridge and a mistress to the most powerful men in England, and yet whose fortunes were nevertheless precarious, always on the brink of being squandered through recklessness, excess and passion.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘It is good to meet the real Jane Austen at last’ Independent on Sunday 'Brilliantly illuminating … by focusing, chapter by chapter, on one thread or another of Austen’s experience, Byrne allows us to grasp the richness of her inner life’ Guardian Who was the real Jane Austen? A retiring spinster content with quiet village life? Or a strong-minded woman who chose to remain unmarried and to fashion herself as a professional writer? Bestselling biographer Paula Byrne uses objects that conjure up a key moment in Austen’s life and work – a vellum notebook, a topaz cross, a writing box and a bathing machine – to reveal the true self of this most beloved author. 'Sparklingly multi-faceted, catching the light in intriguing ways … Byrne’s Jane is far less likely to go for a quiet walk in the garden than she is to be whisked into town in search of a velvet cushion' Mail on Sunday

The inspiration behind the powerful new film starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson, this is the story of Dido Belle, whose adoption by an aristocratic family challenged the conventions of 18th century England.In one of the most famous portraits in the world, a pretty girl walks through the grounds of Kenwood House, a vision of aristocratic refinement. But the eye is drawn to the beautiful woman on her right. Pointing at her own cheek, she playfully acknowledges her remarkable position in eighteenth-century society. For Dido Belle was the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy captain and a slave woman, adopted by the Earl of Mansfield. As Lord Chief Justice of England he would preside over the notorious Zong case – the drowning of 142 slaves by an unscrupulous shipping company. His ruling provided the legal underpinning to the abolition of slavery in Britain.From the privileged yet unequal lives of Dido and her cousin Elizabeth, to the horrific treatment of African slaves, Paula Byrne – the bestselling author of ‘The Real Jane Austen’ – vividly narrates the story of a family that defied convention, the legal trial that exposed the cruelties of slavery and the woman who challenged notions of race at the highest rank.

The remarkable life of the vivacious, clever – and forgotten – Kennedy sister, who charmed the English aristocracy and was almost erased from her family history. The favourite child of Joe Kennedy and favourite sister of Jack, Kick Kennedy was spirited, vivacious and legendary for her charm. When the Kenndys sailed to Britain in 1938 she was presented as a debutante amid the pre-war social whirl of the British aristocracy. Here she met a shy, tall, handsome man called Billy, and, rebelling against family, faith, and country, soon married him. He was William Cavendish, heir to Chatsworth and the Duke of Devonshire, the most eligible bachelor in England. But their days of married bliss proved short, as war would bring tragedy and loss.Uncovering her spectacular life in full for the first time, Paula Byrne depicts a remarkable woman who bewitched the Churchills, Astors and Mitfords, and yet was almost erased from Kennedy family history.

Can you be re-lit by poetry? This little book offers everyone one of the oldest of all remedies for stress: the reading of poetry. Intended to help you endure some of your stressful moments and painful experiences, these poems tell us we are not alone. Returned again and again over the centuries by great imaginations are love and death and memory – remembrance of childhood joy, of happy days and beautiful places, of loved ones we have lost or feeling at peace and at one with the natural world. ‘Stressed Unstressed’ harvests an array of poems on such themes in the hope that they will speak to you when you are processing your worries or when you simply want to fill your mind with different, more positive thoughts.Words can act as drugs, and on the bedside or in a waiting-room this little volume of poetry can help in all sorts of difficult circumstances. So here is a selection of new poems and old, enduring classics and forgotten gems. Next time you are feeling stressed or anxious, worried or sleepless, panicky or unable to cope, ‘Stressed Unstressed’ invites you to read a poem and join the thousands of others who have read and remembered and loved these poems – to form a very special community. This is bibliotherapy.

‘Hollywood, we’re reminded, is after all a through-the-looking glass world, and Byrne writes authoritatively about its illusions and obscene, glittering excess … Compelling’ Daily Mail‘Both eye-poppingly fun and thought-provoking’ The Times Madou is the most beautiful woman in the world. Discovered in a Berlin cabaret in the roaring twenties, she is brought to the glamour of Los Angeles. She becomes a superstar of the silver screen and Hollywood’s darling, but nothing perfect lasts forever.The cost of beauty is always high, for those who have it and those who live in its shadow. The weight falls on her daughter to untangle the complicated truths of being ordinary beside anextraordinary mother, a woman who has bent and broken and skewed her perception of reality, a woman adored by the world, but from whom her daughter longs to escape.Evocative and deeply moving, Blonde Venus is based on Marlene Dietrich’s glittering life, a dramatic novel set in Hollywood’s golden age, that tells the story of mothers and daughters and of time’s war against beauty – and the unbearable pain of a woman when beauty is the only game in town.Previously published as Mirror, Mirror.

A debut novel by a bestselling non-fiction author, this is a witty, wholly entrancing story of the pleasures, pains and obsessions of contemporary life. Lisa Blaize – teacher, and would-be fashion writer, mother and second wife – feels out of place when her high-flying husband becomes the headmaster of a school in a country town. Isolated and far from her metropolitan upbringing, she turns to the one place where she learns she can be uninhibited.But ‘Twitter may be my undoing’, Lisa discovers as her one-time private life becomes all too public. Soon she is dealing with an online stalker and her husband’s reputation is put at risk, but will she be able to give up her addiction?From the gossip of the classroom to our obsession with instant communication, Look To Your Wife is witty and brilliantly observed, revealing the pleasures and pains of contemporary life.

‘Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously’ JILLY COOPER Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021 Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era’s own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer – one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart – so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love?Pym lived through extraordinary times. She attended Oxford in the thirties when women were the minority. She spent time in Nazi Germany, falling for a man who was close to Hitler. She made a career on the Home Front as a single working girl in London’s bedsit land. Through all of this, she wrote. Diaries, notes, letters, stories and more than a dozen novels – which as Byrne shows more often than not reflected the themes of Pym’s own experience: worlds of spinster sisters and academics in unrequited love, of powerful intimacies that pulled together seemingly humble lives.Paula Byrne’s new biography is the first to make full use of Barbara Pym’s archive. Brimming with new extracts from Pym’s diaries, letters and novels, this book is a joyous introduction to a woman who was herself the very best of company.Byrne brings Barbara Pym back to centre stage as one of the great English novelists: a generous, shrewdly perceptive writer and a brave woman, who only in the last years of her life was suddenly, resoundingly recognised for her genius.

A Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian, Independent, New Statesman, Bookseller and at Waterstones 'He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all' Thomas Hardy is one of the most beloved and most-read British authors. His influence on literature and the minds of his readers is singular. But how is it that the novelist who created some of the most memorable and modern female characters in literature had such troubled relationships with real women?In this highly innovative book, acclaimed biographer Paula Byrne re-examines Hardy’s life through the eyes of the women who made him – mother, sisters, girlfriends, wives, muses. The story veers from shocking scenes such as his obsession with the sight of a woman hanged, to poignant vignettes of unfulfilled passion, to fascinating details of working women’s lives in the nineteenth century.Hardy Women is the story of how the magnificent fictional women he invented would not have been possible without the hardship and hardiness of the real ones who shaped his passions and his imagination. It is only through understanding and witnessing these hardy women that we can truly enter the heart of this great novelist and poet.

A Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian, Independent, New Statesman, Bookseller and at Waterstones 'He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all' Thomas Hardy is one of the most beloved and most-read British authors. His influence on literature and the minds of his readers is singular. But how is it that the novelist who created some of the most memorable and modern female characters in literature had such troubled relationships with real women?In this highly innovative book, acclaimed biographer Paula Byrne re-examines Hardy’s life through the eyes of the women who made him – mother, sisters, girlfriends, wives, muses. The story veers from shocking scenes such as his obsession with the sight of a woman hanged, to poignant vignettes of unfulfilled passion, to fascinating details of working women’s lives in the nineteenth century.Hardy Women is the story of how the magnificent fictional women he invented would not have been possible without the hardship and hardiness of the real ones who shaped his passions and his imagination. It is only through understanding and witnessing these hardy women that we can truly enter the heart of this great novelist and poet.

A Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian, Independent, New Statesman, Bookseller and at Waterstones 'He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all' Thomas Hardy is one of the most beloved and most-read British authors. His influence on literature and the minds of his readers is singular. But how is it that the novelist who created some of the most memorable and modern female characters in literature had such troubled relationships with real women?In this highly innovative book, acclaimed biographer Paula Byrne re-examines Hardy’s life through the eyes of the women who made him – mother, sisters, girlfriends, wives, muses. The story veers from shocking scenes such as his obsession with the sight of a woman hanged, to poignant vignettes of unfulfilled passion, to fascinating details of working women’s lives in the nineteenth century.Hardy Women is the story of how the magnificent fictional women he invented would not have been possible without the hardship and hardiness of the real ones who shaped his passions and his imagination. It is only through understanding and witnessing these hardy women that we can truly enter the heart of this great novelist and poet.

From the bestselling biographer and author of the book that inspired the BBC TV series – Jane Austen Rise of a Genius – comes a gorgeously escapist novel about the summer the greatest romance novelist fell in love ‘A glorious romantic retelling’ SUN‘Delicious’ THE TIMES‘The Jane Austen beach book fans have been waiting for' KIRKUS 1801, Sidmouth. The Austen family descends upon a fashionable seaside resort in Devonshire for a six-week holiday. Jane's brother, Frank, is on leave from the Royal Navy, and dearly wishes to unite his sister with his friend Captain Peter Parker. But another holidaymaker, a handsome stranger, catches sight of Jane and is determined to make her acquaintance.This rival to Captain Parker is Samuel Rose: a lawyer, literary man and abolitionist. As the weeks pass, Jane's relationship with both men brings about unexpected surprises. By the end of the summer, the course of her life will have changed forever. ‘I felt like I was reading a Jane Austen’ Kylie Pentelow, Woman’s Hour

From the bestselling biographer and author of the book that inspired the BBC TV series – Jane Austen Rise of a Genius – comes a gorgeously escapist novel about the summer the greatest romance novelist fell in love ‘A glorious romantic retelling’ SUN‘Delicious’ THE TIMES‘The Jane Austen beach book fans have been waiting for' KIRKUS 1801, Sidmouth. The Austen family descends upon a fashionable seaside resort in Devonshire for a six-week holiday. Jane's brother, Frank, is on leave from the Royal Navy, and dearly wishes to unite his sister with his friend Captain Peter Parker. But another holidaymaker, a handsome stranger, catches sight of Jane and is determined to make her acquaintance.This rival to Captain Parker is Samuel Rose: a lawyer, literary man and abolitionist. As the weeks pass, Jane's relationship with both men brings about unexpected surprises. By the end of the summer, the course of her life will have changed forever. ‘I felt like I was reading a Jane Austen’ Kylie Pentelow, Woman’s Hour

From the bestselling biographer and author of the book that inspired the BBC TV series – Jane Austen Rise of a Genius – comes a gorgeously escapist novel about the summer the greatest romance novelist fell in love ‘A glorious romantic retelling’ SUN‘Delicious’ THE TIMES‘The Jane Austen beach book fans have been waiting for' KIRKUS 1801, Sidmouth. The Austen family descends upon a fashionable seaside resort in Devonshire for a six-week holiday. Jane's brother, Frank, is on leave from the Royal Navy, and dearly wishes to unite his sister with his friend Captain Peter Parker. But another holidaymaker, a handsome stranger, catches sight of Jane and is determined to make her acquaintance.This rival to Captain Parker is Samuel Rose: a lawyer, literary man and abolitionist. As the weeks pass, Jane's relationship with both men brings about unexpected surprises. By the end of the summer, the course of her life will have changed forever. ‘I felt like I was reading a Jane Austen’ Kylie Pentelow, Woman’s Hour

Emma is widely regarded as Jane Austen's most perfectly constructed novel. At once a comedy of misunderstanding, a razor-sharp analysis of the English class-system, a classic tale of moral growth, and a romance that combines sense with sensibility, it has appealed to readers of every generation and critics of every disposition.This sourcebook introduces readers not only to Jane Austen's text, but also to the literary and historical contexts within which the novel was written, and to the many different critical readings that it has generated, from the time of its publication to the twenty-first century. Each extract is fully introduced and analyzed, with a concluding section on recommended editions and further reading to prepare the reader for further study of this incomparable English novel.

Emma is widely regarded as Jane Austen's most perfectly constructed novel. At once a comedy of misunderstanding, a razor-sharp analysis of the English class-system, a classic tale of moral growth, and a romance that combines sense with sensibility, it has appealed to readers of every generation and critics of every disposition.This sourcebook introduces readers not only to Jane Austen's text, but also to the literary and historical contexts within which the novel was written, and to the many different critical readings that it has generated, from the time of its publication to the twenty-first century. Each extract is fully introduced and analyzed, with a concluding section on recommended editions and further reading to prepare the reader for further study of this incomparable English novel.