Victoria Glendinning – författare

From Victoria Glendinning, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and (twice) the Whitbread Prize for Biography. ‘It’s Succession in tailcoats and spats … This is a vivid and eye-opening group biography, backgrounded by the rise of supermarket moguls from humble beginnings’ Sunday Times Who was John Lewis? What story lies behind the retail empire that bears his name? Behind the glass windows and displays of soft furnishing, this book reveals the family that founded the shops in all their eccentricities, and whose relationships became blighted by conflicts of epic proportions as their wealth bloomed. Born into poverty, John Lewis was orphaned at the age of seven when his father died in a Somerset workhouse. Dreaming of a better life, the young man travelled to London at the start of what would become a retail revolution. From early years as a draper’s apprentice, we see how Lewis’s first pokey little business opened on Oxford Street in 1864, and expanded as an emerging middle class embraced the department stores as a recreational experience.Prize-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning has had full access to the company and family archives to write this eye-opening story. She captures the toxic relationships that unfolded between Lewis and his two sons, Spedan and Oswald, as they collided over the future of their retail empire – their worst moments including emotional blackmail, face-slapping and a kidnapping – and much litigation between father and both sons.Yet the family never broke up and Spedan’s vision of a Partnership model to act as an ethical corrective and foster a community of happier, more productive workers was eventually realised and survives to this day.With riveting personal detail, this brilliant group biography captures a rags-to-riches story and a tempestuous family saga, all unfolding against the dramatic social and political worlds of nineteenth-century London. The book concludes with an assessment of the position John Lewis holds in British sensibilities, and whether John Lewis and institutions like it have a place in our future.

In this richly detailed biography Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist (The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day) whose literary achievements were matched by her tremendous talent for living. Taking us from Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in Ireland to Oxford (where she met Yeats and Eliot), through her service as an air-raid warden in London during World War II, to her friendships with such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Glendinning lifts the veil between Bowen's imaginative world and the complex emotional life that fired her novels. 'One of the best critical biographies to have come my way for some time... A beautifully composed portrait.' Sunday Telegraph'It reads like a good novel.' Irish Times

Her looks attracted Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. Among her friends were Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The 1930s she spent in penury, writing fiction, biography and verse. Only when Yeats hailed her as 'a major poet' did her work reach a wider audience, whereupon Edith Sitwell set off to conquer New York and Hollywood. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, this is the definitive portrait of a spontaneous, gallant, yet tragically insecure woman.'The excellence of Mrs Glendinning's book is that it remains wise and balanced while never sacrificing critical edge... It's hard to imagine a life of Edith Sitwell that could surpass it.' John Carey, Sunday Times

‘Historical fiction at its finest' @MargaretAtwood (Twitter)It is 1535 and Agnes Peppin, daughter of a West-country butcher, has been banished, leaving her family home in disgrace to live out the rest of her life cloistered behind the walls of Shaftesbury Abbey. While Agnes grapples with the complex rules and hierarchies of the sisterhood, King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself Head of the Church of England. Religious houses are being formally subjugated, monasteries dissolved, and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. Cast out with her sisters, Agnes is at last free to be the master of her own fate. But freedom comes at a price as she descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive - by any means necessary...

'There are no grown-ups.' Everyone in this wickedly entertaining novel, whatever their age, bullies or deceives or adores someone else, in the merciless playgrounds of London flats, country villages, television studios and conferences. At the centre of it all is Leo Ulm, social scientist and media guru, who magnetizes his wives, lovers and friends with his fading brilliance. He obsesses them all, including clear-eyed Clara, though she may often wish he were dead. The god of his own universe, Leo is monstrously vain and arrogant - until something happens which leaves all the women in his life in shock. Then, perhaps, Clara begins to grow up….

The Whitbread Prize-winning biography of Vita Sackville-West.Vita Sackville-West was a vital, gifted and complex woman. A dedicated writer, she made her mark as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist and broadcaster. She was also one of the most influential English gardeners of the century, creating with her husband the famous gardens at Sissinghurst. Glendinning documents Vita's extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband Harold Nicolson, and her two sons together with her unpublicised love affairs.Vita was determined to be more than just a married woman and mother; her passionate, secretive character, and the strains, mistakes and achievements of her remarkable life makes this an absorbing and disturbing book.

Charlotte Mortimer, brought up in the narrow confines and high tensions of a London suburb, escapes from a world bound by strict conventions into one on the brink of change. She marries Peter Fisher, a fiery young prophet of the new science of electricity. But, in the country mansion which her new husband is wiring for electric light, she forms a liaison with the irresistible master of the house. Sensual, spirited, trapped once again, Charlotte struggles to find her way through the choices pressing upon her.

Many people today know Leonard Woolf mainly through the surname of his wife, Virginia, or his role in supporting her through her mental illness, depicted in films like The Hours. Some critics see him as his wife's oppressor. In Victoria Glendinning's biography, for the first time we see the whole man. As well as being a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, Leonard was a formidable figure in his own right, first as an innovative civil administrator in Ceylon, then as a writer, leading light of the Fabian society and publisher of TS Eliot, EM Forster, Robert Graves, Katherine Mansfield and of course Virginia Woolf. He was interested in everything and knew everybody. The achievement of Glendinning's book is to make its readers wish that they knew him too.

By the time of his death, Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the founder of Singapore and Governor of Java, having left school in his early teens to become a clerk for the British East India Company. Charismatic and daring, Raffles forged an extraordinary path for himself in South East Asia - refusing to be satisfied with the trading posts available to the British, he defied Dutch governors and wrangled with warring local rulers to establish what is now a world city. An ardent linguist and zoologist, Raffles spoke fluent Malay and found time to write The History of Java, as well as naming several species of flora and fauna he discovered on his travels. He founded London Zoo and promoted the study of Malay alongside European languages in Southeast Asia.Raffles remains a controversial figure - a utopian imperialist, disobedient employee and knight of the realm who died deeply in debt, predeceased by all but one of his children. He built racial segregation into his urban planning, but was also a staunch abolitionist. Renowned biographer Victoria Glendinning charts Raffles' prodigious rise in this new edition, specially updated for the bicentenary of the foundation of Singapore in 1819. His life was short, complicated and shot through with tragedy, but Raffles' fame lives on.

'I always wanted everything so frantically, and I'm just the person that can't have them.' Based on family papers and memories, this picture of middle class life at the end of the nineteenth century tells the poignant story of Winnie Seebohm, Victoria Glendinning's great-aunt, who in 1885 was one of the early students at Newnham College, Cambridge. Though much loved by her family, Winnie was stifled in her desire for life and died at the age of twenty-two.