Miranda Seymour

Miranda Seymour has written biographies of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves and Jean Rhys, among others.

Letter

Lauraphobia

10 March 1994

Naomi Mitchison remembers having been present at a party in the spring of 1929, during which Laura Riding made her famous leap from – if we include the basement – the third-floor rear window of the maisonette which she shared with Robert Graves in St Peter’s Square, Hammersmith (Letters, 7 April). But there was no party on that occasion. Only Graves, his wife Nancy Nicholson and Geoffrey Taylor...
Letter

Morgie

13 May 1993

Frank Kermode is not taken by Nicola Beauman’s decision to write of ‘Morgan’ and, on occasion, of ‘Morgie’ in her biography of E.M. Forster (LRB, 13 May) It is, he suggests, excessively intimate; her predecessor, P.N. Furbank, ‘was quite right to regard the familiarity implied by regular use of the first name as out of place in a biography written for those who had no claim to it’.I write,...

Gobblebook: Unhappy Ever After

Rosemary Hill, 21 June 2018

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...

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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...

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Tousy-Mousy: Mary Shelley

Anne Barton, 8 February 2001

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...

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Old Gravy

Mark Ford, 7 September 1995

‘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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