Victorian Biography

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 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...

D. H. Lawrence wrote about desire, class, and the body with a directness that got his books banned. He also wrote some of the most psychologically acute fiction of the twentieth century. This edition collects the four novels that define his achievement. He is the writer whom respectable literary culture has never quite known how to place — too explicit for the academics, too serious for the readers who want explicit. Lawrence was neither pornographer nor sage, which is perhaps why he irritates both camps equally. He was a novelist of unusual precision about the things people don't say in ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

“Look unto Jesus and be saved!” Charles didn’t keep the words that changed his life to himself. Charles Spurgeon was a simple country lad who went on to become one of the best known preachers in London, Europe and the world. Caught in a snowstorm one day when he was a teenager, he crept...

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 ...

David Livingstone became one of the most famous explorers of the Victorian age, but the man behind the legend was far more complicated than the heroic image preserved in schoolbooks and memorials. Born into a working-class Scottish family, Livingstone rose from the cotton mills of Blantyre to become a doctor, missionary, explorer, abolitionist and international celebrity. His journeys across southern and central Africa transformed European geographical knowledge, drew attention to the horrors of the slave trade and made his name synonymous with Victorian exploration. Yet Livingstone never ...

William Gladstone was one of the most powerful, difficult, and morally driven statesmen in British history. Born into wealth, educated at Eton and Oxford, and formed by religion, discipline, and duty, Gladstone began public life as a Conservative defender of church and order. Yet over a political career that stretched across more than sixty years, he became the defining Liberal statesman of Victorian Britain: Chancellor of the Exchequer, four-time Prime Minister, reformer, campaigner, and the fierce moral rival of Benjamin Disraeli. This full-length biography traces Gladstone’s ...

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.

One of the nineteenth century's most consequential — and most contested — spiritual figures. Helena Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society, wrote two of the most influential esoteric texts of the modern era, and was publicly branded "one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history." Both things are true, and this biography holds them together rather than choosing a side. Tracing her life from a plague-era Russian childhood through a disastrous teenage marriage, years of unverifiable wandering across Egypt and possibly Tibet, a failed spiritualist ...

“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 ...

Oscar Wilde entered the courtroom in 1895 as one of the most brilliant and celebrated men in Britain. He left it disgraced, imprisoned, and marked for exile. The Trial of Oscar Wilde tells the story of the legal battle that shattered his career and exposed the moral contradictions of Victorian England. This book follows Wilde from his meteoric rise in London society to the reckless libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, the criminal trials that followed, the sentence of two years’ hard labour, and the long aftermath of prison, exile, illness, and early death. It is not only the...

Into Africa: The Extraordinary Journeys of Frederick Courteney Selous – Volumes 1 & 2 Two volumes. One extraordinary life. The complete story of one of Africa's greatest explorers. Before he became a legend, Frederick Courteney Selous was simply a young man determined to explore Africa. In an age when vast regions of the continent remained unknown to Europeans, Selous ventured deep into the African interior with little more than a rifle, a few supplies and an extraordinary appetite for adventure. He crossed raging rivers, travelled through country inhabited by lions, elephants, buffalo, ...

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...

Benjamin Disraeli was never meant to rule Britain. Born outside the old aristocratic world, marked by religious difference, mocked in Parliament, burdened by debt, and dismissed by many as a theatrical outsider, Disraeli forced his way into the centre of Victorian power. Through wit, ambition, imagination, and ruthless political instinct, he became one of the most remarkable Prime Ministers Britain ever produced. This biography traces Disraeli’s rise from literary ambition and public humiliation to Conservative leadership, royal favour, imperial statecraft, and lasting political influence...

'Moore is wickedly charming - the naughty uncle you want to be sat beside at the dinner table' - Daily Telegraph Too often history focuses on the tales of kings, or those (often men) who were given the credit for shaping our stories. Yet, what fascinates most are the figures who have passed...

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 ...

Uncover the Hidden Truths of a Forgotten Era. Beneath the grandeur of the Victorian age lies a tapestry of stories rarely told—of queer lives erased, voices silenced, and rebels punished for stepping outside the bounds of respectability. The Lost Lives of the 19th Century invites readers into the shadows of history to rediscover figures who dared to live authentically, love defiantly, and resist quietly in a world that refused to see them. From the encoded diaries of Anne Lister to the trials of Stella and Fanny, this compelling work of narrative nonfiction restores dignity to lives ...