Victorian Biography

“How did women in the past deal with their forbidden desires? In Her Most Secret Affair, Jesalin Creswell gives us an intimate look into the lives of two women and a historical brothel that brings them together—and leaves them forever changed.” “This is one of the best stories I've read in a very long time.” Miranda Dashwood was born wealthy, but now she struggles to survive. Her deceased father's gambling debts have crippled the household. With no skills and no experience, Miranda resigns herself to the world's oldest profession and loathes every moment of her new life... Until ...

THE LEGEND REEXAMINED – THE CRIME THAT SHOCKED A NATION RETURNS TO THE STAND On the sweltering morning of August 4, 1892, a scream shattered the stillness of Fall River, Massachusetts. Within minutes, a quiet home on Second Street became the most infamous address in America. Inside lay Andrew and Abby Borden—bludgeoned, brutalized, and left to bleed on the polished floors of their own home. Standing in the doorway was their daughter, Lizzie Borden—calm, pale, and soon to be accused of the most sensational crime of the nineteenth century. Axed: The Untold Shocking True Story of Lizzie ...

The remarkable true story of one of Britain's best-loved novelists, narrated by Lucy Worsley 'This book is a delight . . . I will return to Austen's novels with a greater appreciation of the hardships and hopes of her heroines.' - LISTENER REVIEW ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'I devoured this. Jane's story is...

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey's wonderfully witty and Wildean quartet of biographies, stands out as one of the most radical and groundbreaking works of its genre. With relentless precision, Strachey explores the lives of four exemplars of the Victorian age: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, irreverently bringing to light the flaws, strengths, ambitions and hypocrisies of these treasured legends.

In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.

The true story for fans of the PBS Masterpiece series Victoria, this page-turning biography reveals the real woman behind the myth: a bold, glamorous, unbreakable queen—a Victoria for our times. Drawing on previously unpublished papers, this stunning portrait is a story of love and heartbreak...

Sourcebooks is bringing the internationally acclaimed New York Times bestseller back for a new generation of listeners. Jennie Churchill was not merely Winston’s mother. She was the most captivating and desired woman of her age. Originally from Brooklyn, Jennie became the reigning queen of British society. Beautiful and defiant, she lived with an honesty that made her the talk of two continents.

Cecil Rhodes was one of the most ambitious and controversial figures of the late Victorian Empire. Sent to southern Africa as a sickly young Englishman, he rose to become a diamond magnate, the driving force behind De Beers, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, founder of the British South Africa Company, and the imperial dreamer whose name was placed across a vast territory: Rhodesia. But Rhodes’s story is not simply one of wealth, energy, and empire. It is also a story of monopoly, racial hierarchy, dispossession, political manipulation, and the dangerous belief that one man’s vision ...

The novel that invented suspense fiction — and that remains, a hundred and sixty years later, more structurally daring than most of the genre it created. This Erato Press critical edition reads The Woman in White as the serious, sophisticated, and morally disturbing novel it actually is, beneath the page-turner it also is. On a summer night in 1859, a young drawing-master walks across Hampstead Heath toward London. A hand touches his shoulder. He turns and finds himself facing a woman dressed entirely in white, trembling, desperate, asking for help. Within minutes she has vanished into a ...

What kind of man walks out of a back yard at dawn with a uterus in his pocket, then sits down to read about himself in the morning paper? For over a hundred and thirty years, the world has been chasing the wrong man. The cape. The top hat. The royal physician with a black bag and a brougham. Every generation paints him a new costume. The truth has never worn one. Jack The Ripper, the Whitechapel killer was almost certainly a man you would have walked past on the way to the baker. Quiet. Polite. Forgettable. He paid his landlady on time. He nodded at the constable on the corner.

What if everything you know about Jack the Ripper is wrong? Since 1888, hundreds of suspects have been proposed for the Jack the Ripper murders–from Polish barbers to Freemason conspiracies. But what if investigators have been asking the wrong question? Instead of asking ‘Who was Jack the Ripper?’, Richard Walker asked ‘How were these murders actually committed?’ What he discovered is truly shocking.

Queen Victoria did not create the Victorian age, but she became the face by which it was remembered. When Alexandrina Victoria came to the throne in 1837, she was an eighteen-year-old queen emerging from a controlled and unhappy childhood. By the time she died in 1901, she had become Queen-Empress, widow, matriarch, symbol of empire, and the living name of an age. Queen Victoria: The Woman Behind the Imperial Age examines the woman behind the monumental image. It follows her from the restrictions of Kensington Palace to the exhilaration of young sovereignty, from her marriage to Prince ...

Lord Palmerston was the statesman who made Victorian Britain sound invincible. Born into aristocratic privilege in 1784, Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, lived through the age of Napoleon, the rise of reform, the revolutions of Europe, the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, Italian unification, and the American Civil War. Few British politicians served so long. Fewer still shaped the national mood so completely. As Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister, Palmerston became the voice of British confidence. He defended British subjects abroad, challenged autocratic powers, ...

The Brontë sisters have long been remembered as literary legends: three gifted women writing in isolation on the Yorkshire moors, surrounded by tragedy and myth. But behind that familiar image were three fiercely intelligent, determined, and ambitious writers who reshaped English literature forever. In this book, they're brought vividly back to life—not as distant icons, but as real women forged by grief, discipline, imagination, and extraordinary creative force. From the harsh realities of Haworth Parsonage to the publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell ...

The Definitive Biography of Oscar Wilde: Genius, Scandal, and Literary Immortality Oscar Wilde dominated Victorian London like no writer before or since. His plays revolutionized English theater. His fairy tales are still read to children worldwide. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray remains a masterpiece of Gothic fiction. His wit was legendary, his conversation unmatched, his aesthetic philosophy influential across generations. Then Victorian England destroyed him through a prosecution that was meant to erase his name from cultural memory. It failed. This comprehensive biography follows...

“I really love Jesalin's style. Her writing captures the era's sense of propriety, and the way society bound women to their positions. But her writing is also modern and easy to read, so you don't get bogged down. I loved the leads and thought they were very compelling. It was a nice quick read, and made my day!" Vivian Hollingsworth is disillusioned about love. After losing her husband at just twenty-five, she grieved for almost two years, unable to let go of her sorrow. She knows she needs to become a part of the London's social scene once again, but she’s lost all hope of finding ...

Discover these horror stories of the Victorian era, with Gothic tales from J. S. Lee Fanu. This definitive audio version is narrated by Jilly Bond and brings the classic horrors of old to a new audience. Ghostly Tales by J. S. Le Fanu is brought to audio for the first time. Dim the lights and listen to these unsettling tales of Victorian horror. Fanu is described as a "master of the genre" by subsequent distinguished authors such as E. F. Bleiler. Fanu's unique approach helped to usher in a new, more psychological era of dread.

The life of one of Western art's most admired and misunderstood painters J.M.W. Turner is one of the most important figures in Western art, and his visionary work paved the way for a revolution in landscape painting. Over the course of his lifetime, Turner strove to liberate painting from an...

From the author of American Eden—finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and more—comes a sweeping, richly researched biography of Frederic Church, the great 19th-century American artist whose stunning paintings of remote lands and seas thrilled American audiences and put...

The complete fiction of one of the greatest novelists in the English language — all eight novels, both novellas, and the late prose of George Eliot, gathered in a single annotated volume with original critical essays for every work. Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), writing as George Eliot, created the most intellectually ambitious fiction of the Victorian age. Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." This Erato Press edition brings together the whole of her fiction, complete and unabridged, and surrounds it with a critical apparatus ...