Frances wilson author biography of suzanne

  • Frances Wilson was educated at Oxford University and lectured on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature for fifteen years before.
  • Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers.
  • The prize-winning biography of Wordsworth's beloved sister, champion, muse who was at the heart of the Romantic movement in Britain.

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    Irresistible Iris

    “Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” wonders Daniel Deronda, watching Gwendolen Harleth at the roulette table. The face of Iris Murdoch, as it appears on the books that have shaped her afterlife, inspires the same question. Here she is with her square jaw, pug nose, and Joan of Arc haircut on the cover of Peter Conradi’s hagiography, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), looking sidelong at the reader with her elsewhere eyes; here she is again, reticent and remote on the first two volumes of John Bayley’s Iris Trilogy, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998) and Iris and the Friends (1999); and again, with the reserve of a postulant nun, on the front of A.N. Wilson’s Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (2003). Murdoch photographs are less a likeness than a Platonic idea. A mood, a mind, a deep, private center of being: this is what philosophy, or literature, or high seriousness looks like. Her face carries some “central, large, and simple

  • frances wilson author biography of suzanne

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    The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life

    June 2, 2015
    Terrible writing, I really had to force myself to finish this book. I think what bothered me the most was how the author, Frances Wilson, would compare these real life people -- Dorothy Wordsworth, her brother, William Wordsworth, and Coleridge-- with book characters. Here are a few examples --

    ". . . The relationship between Dorothy and William is simply too demanding, or to embarrassing, to deal with. These biographers are positioned in relation to their story like Nelly Dean, the tone less narrator of the events that compose Wuthering Heights."

    ". . . William described himself and Dorothy as resembling two swans-- birds who mate for life-- and in her last dark years the now inarticulate sounds she made were compared to those of "a partridge or a turkey. But the bird that comes most to my mind when I read Dorothy's journals is the albatross draped around the Ancient Mariner's neck in Coleridge's famous Rime."

    " . . . the en

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    The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

    The prize-winning biography of Wordsworth’s beloved sister, champion, muse who was at the heart of the Romantic movement in Britain – reissued to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Dorothy’s birth.

    ‘Genius … Its own kind of heaven.’ New York Times

    ‘A most beautiful, deep, and humble study of incredibly complex people.’ Oliver Sacks

    Dorothy Wordsworth is an enigma. William’s beloved sister was his muse, mästare, and most valued reader. She fryst vatten mythologised as a self-effacing spinster and saintly amanuensis, yet Thomas De Quincey described her as ‘all fire and ardour’.

    Dorothy sacrificed a traditional life to share in her brother’s world of words. In her Grasmere Journals, she vividly recorded their intimate life together in the Lake District, marked by a startling freedom from social convention. The tale that unfolds in her brief, electric entries reveals an i