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Cargando... Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means: A Biographypor Brendan King
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Dame Beryl Bainbridge was one of the most popular and recognisable English novelists of her generation. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, and her critically acclaimed novels The Dressmaker (1973), The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), An Awfully Big Adventure (1990), Every Man For Himself (1996) and Master Georgie (1998), confirmed her status as one of the major literary figures of the past fifty years.A unique voice in fiction, and unforgettable in person, Beryl Bainbridge was famous for her gregarious drinking habits and her unconventional lifestyle. Yet underneath the public image of a quirky eccentric lay a complex and sometimes traumatic private life that she rarely talked about and which was often only hinted at in her novels.In this first full-length biography, Brendan King draws on a mass of unpublished letters and diaries to reveal the real woman behind the popular image. He explores Bainbridge's difficult childhood in Formby, her career as a young actress at the Liverpool Playhouse, and her life as a single mother and writer in Camden Town. Along the way he tackles her complex private life: her failed marriage to the painter Austin Davies, her affairs, and her longstanding relationship with her publisher, Colin Haycraft.This frank portrait of Beryl Bainbridge tells the story of a life that is every bit as dramatic and compelling as one of her own perfectly-crafted novels. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Brendan King tries to tease out the relationship between her writings and her actual life. Many of her contemporary novels draw on her experiences and include portrayals which may be based on real people but they are not memoir, and they are developed into fiction. Also, Bainbridge's diaries, letters and the stories she told about herself often included substantial changes in details. For example, she claimed some of her experiences had happened at a significantly younger age than was really the case.
This is quite a long book, nearly 500 pages of the main text with 60 pages of carefully referenced endnotes. There are 16 pages of black and white photographs of Beryl Bainbridge, various men in her life and friends.
I found it an interesting read and it makes me want to pick up her novels at some point, but I also found the subject of this book quite frustrating - some of the men in her life sound quite unpleasant and some of her choices in her life appear to have been quite self-destructive. It is quite a "gossipy" warts and all memoir though in a carefully researched literary style. ( )