Miranda Seymour Books

There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From that night emerged in Frankenstein a monster who has haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years. His creator was an eighteen-year-old girl who, in love with the married Shelley, had followed her principles and run away with him. The Mary Shelley we meet here, brilliantly brought to life from previously unexplored sources, is a woman who belongs as much to our own times as to the Romantic Age in which her life began. Her world, so rich in its cast of characters seems at times drawn from a novel, and at its centre is a writer whose dark and brilliant imagination gave us a myth which seems ever more potent in our own era.

‘A kind of blissography, teeming with bon mots’ Sunday Times

An intimate, profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.

A beautifully written and hugely acclaimed account of a fascinating twentieth- century life: Helene Delangle, also known as Helle Nice, dancer, lover -- and record-breaking racing driver.

A biography and family memoir by turns hilarious and heart-wrenching, Miranda Seymour's Thrumpton Hall is a riveting, frequently shocking, and ultimately unforgettable true story of the devastating consequences of obsessive desire and misplaced love. "Dear Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight." When twenty-one-year-old George Seymour wrote these words in 1944, the object of his affection was not a young woman but the beautiful country house in Nottinghamshire that he desired above all else. Miranda Seymour would later be raised at Thrumpton Hall—her upbringing far from idyllic, as life revolved around her father's odd capriciousness. The house took priority over everything, even his family—until the day when George Seymour, in his golden years, began dressing in black leather and riding powerful motorbikes around the countryside in the company of surprising friends. For fans of Downton Abbey—the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, called it “brilliant, original, and intensely readable”—Thrumpton Hall is a poignant and memorable true story of family.

This biography of the poet Robert Graves has been written with the co-operation of his family and with access to private papers and photographs.

A biography of a memorable figure from the Bloomsbury period. There are revelations regarding her affairs with Bertrand Russell, Augustus John and Axel Munthe. This is also the story of her friendships with D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Aldous Huxley.