In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sheryle Bagwell chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Letter from Provence: Two Women, Two Centuries and a Village House in France.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Sheryle Bagwell explains how the chance discovery of a dust-covered volume of Madame de Sévigné’s letters in her Provençal attic became the catalyst for a story she had been unconsciously preparing to write for several decades.
• Sheryle reveals that the ‘two women’ of the subtitle are her mother Judith and Madame de Sévigné, a distinction that reframes the emotional architecture of the story.
• Sheryle describes how Madame de Sévigné, writing before the age of newspapers, effectively functioned as the world’s first blogger, giving her intimate circle and ultimately history, eyewitness accounts of Louis XIV’s court through letters she knew were being read aloud and passed around.
• Sheryle describes the discovery that her mother Judith and Madame de Sévigné had striking parallels. Both were feisty and both died without their daughters present, which became the emotional spine of the story.
• Sheryle reflects on writing the book later in life as an intentional choice: ‘I don’t think I could have written this book in mid-career’, she said. ‘I needed the wisdom that comes later in life to honestly reckon with a childhood shaped by domestic violence and a mother who never got to escape it.’
• Sheryle closes the story with a letter to her mother written from Provence, which she describes as the first letter she ever wrote to her mother, and the one the entire story was always travelling towards.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Nigel Hamilton chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Lincoln vs. Davis is the first dual biography to examine how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis fought each other as presidents and commanders-in-chief of their respective forces, the Union and the Confederacy, during the American Civil War.
• Lincoln and Davis coincidentally began train journeys to their Presidential inaugurations on the same day.
• By framing emancipation as a military order during a national emergency rather than civilian legislation, Lincoln legally freed 3.5 million enslaved people and ensured no European power would ever recognise the Confederacy, dooming Davis’s rebellion.
• Frustrated that historians have covered up crucial details and failed to explain why Lincoln delayed emancipation for nearly two years, Nigel Hamilton crafted Lincoln vs. Davis to correct the historical record, practising what he refers to as ‘biography as corrective’.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Zachary Leader chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Richard Ellmann’s biography of the novelist James Joyce is considered the greatest literary biography of the 20th century.
• Why Zachary Leader was inspired to craft Ellmann’s Joyce.
• Why Ellmann’s Joyce is structured in two sections: a chronological life of Richard Ellmann followed by a thematic ‘making of James Joyce’s biography’ section.
• Why Zachary opened the narrative with a chapter defending literary biography.
• Why Zachary portrayed Ellmann’s James Joyce as both scholarship and art, foregrounding Ellmann’s narrative craft, wit and realist virtues.
• Why Ellmann’s Joyce is a practical masterclass in biography.