Miranda Seymour has written biographies of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves and Jean Rhys, among others.
In Merchant Ivory’s 1981 adaptation of Jean Rhys’s first novel, Quartet (1928), Alan Bates and Maggie Smith play a predatory expatriate couple, H.J. and Lois Heidler. Their vulnerable and volatile young victim, Marya Zelli – Isabelle Adjani won an award at Cannes for her performance – is forced to take refuge with the couple after her husband is arrested and sent to prison.
A marriage that makes a good end to a comedy will often make as good a beginning to a tragedy. If any couple bore out that maxim it was Annabella Milbanke and George Gordon Byron. The ‘happy’ chapter...
The Paris-Madrid road race of 1903 was a wonderfully disgraceful affair. Three hundred cars set out, conferring death and dismemberment along the dust-choked roads south. Six of the drivers were...
Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually...
‘Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which...
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