Miranda Seymour

Deciphering Dame Muriel

In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson attempts to crack the ingenious codes that were of prime importance in Muriel Spark’s life and writing.

Mary Shelley’s ‘Hideous Progeny’

Through Mary Shelley’s letters, journal, and work-in-progress, we can trace the development of Frankenstein from a simple ghost story to her most famous novel.

A Hectic Life

The bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death is an opportunity to ask what a witty dandy with the flamboyant attitudes of a raucously chauvinistic age can offer today’s world.

As Pluck Would Have It

Antonia Fraser’s new biography of the hectically adulterous Lady Caroline Lamb celebrates her as a woman who resisted convention.

Consider the Publisher

Behind Mary Wollstonecraft was a courageous publisher and his network of eighteenth-century London’s most radical minds.

‘Turbulence and Misery’

Anguish, provoked by her acute sense of physical and social inadequacy, was essential for Jean Stafford’s literary talent to flourish.

Our Trojan Moment

Pat Barker’s trilogy-in-progress is the most recent attempt to give a powerful voice to Homer’s silenced women.

Promethean Women

Both Mary Wollstonecraft, darling of twentieth-century feminists, and her visionary daughter Mary Shelley continue to influence us today.

‘The Awful Force of Inanimate Things’

The Magnetic Polymath