Victoria Glendinning Books

Anthony Trollope is, with Dickens, perhaps the most enduringly popular Victorian novelist. Born in 1815, he initially made his living working for the Post Office, and introduced the pillar box into Britain. He was also an enthusiastic rider to hounds, a Liberal parliamentary candidate, a magazine editor, a traveller, the devoted friend of Thackeray and George Eliot and the author of over 60 books and a vast amount of journalism. This book explores Trollope's private life - his unhappy childhood, his relationships with his wife and a beautiful American, Kate Fielding - while creating a picture of the times in which he lived.

The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her passionate affair with the novelist Virginia Woolf, and Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which she and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, created at their estate. This is her biography.

Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer and wit, Swift is best known as the author of "Gulliver's Travels". In this biography, Victoria Glendinning investigates the main events and relationships of Swift's life and provides a portrait set in a tapestry of controversy and paradox.

"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.

Presents a detailed biography of Dame Edith Sitwell, the iconoclastic and complex English poet, discussing the life and literary career of an eccentric and contradictory woman

A portrait of a newly independent woman striving to break free from her overly concerned family's influence later in life.

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.

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the charismatic and persuasive founder of Singapore and Governor of Java. An English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, zoologist and civil servant, he carved an extraordinary (though brief) life for himself in South East Asia. The tropical, disease-ridden settings of his story are as dramatic as his own trajectory - an obscure young man with no advantages other than talent and obsessive drive, who changed history by establishing - without authority - on the wretchedly unpromising island of Singapore a settlement which has become a world city.After a turbulent time in the East Indies, Raffles returned to the UK and turned to his other great interests - botany and zoology. He founded London Zoo in 1826, the year of his death.Raffles remains a controversial figure, and in the first biography for over forty years, Victoria Glendinning charts his prodigious rise within the social and historical contexts of his world. His domestic and personal life was vivid and shot through with tragedy. His own end was sad, but his fame immortal.

In Victorian England, electricity is the latest scientific marvel, a fireless light that announces a new era. For Charlotte Mortimer, electricity yields something even more powerful. When she weds an ardent young engineer who is commissioned to wire the estate of a country gentleman, Charlotte finds herself in a disorienting world of new ideas and sensations--and a passion that ultimately forces her to forge a life on her own terms.