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The Peppered Moth
''The Peppered Moth'' is a 2000 novel by English writer Margaret Drabble; it is her fourteenth published novel. The novel follows the fictional experiences of three generations of women within one family, and contains several elements that are loosely based on Drabble's own biographical experience. The novel received mixed reviews, with some authors noting the relative weakness of Drabble's blending of fictional and biographical elements. Background Drabble, in the afterword for the novel, describes it as a loose adaptation of her mother's life. ''Publishers Weekly'' described the fictional representation of her mother, the protagonist Bessie Bawtry, as very unsympathetic and "thinly veiled". When discussing the investigation of matrilineal traits in the novel, critic Yi-Lin Yu describes the relationship between Drabble and the fictional representation of her mother as fraught. In part, the poor representation has a lot to do with the difficulty Drabble had in evoking her moth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biography In Literature
When studying literature, biography and its relationship to literature is often a subject of literary criticism, and is treated in several different forms. Two scholarly approaches use biography or biographical approaches to the past as a tool for interpreting literature: literary biography and biographical criticism. Conversely, two genres of fiction rely heavily on the incorporation of biographical elements into their content: biographical fiction and autobiographical fiction. Literary biography A literary biography is the biographical exploration of the lives of writers and artists. Biographies about artists and writers are sometimes some of the most complicated forms of biography. Not only does the author of the biography have to write about the subject of the biography but also must incorporate discussion of the subject-author's literary works into the biography itself.Karl, Frederick R. "Joseph Conrad" in Meyers (ed.) ''The Craft'', pp 69–88 Literary biographers must balance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Viking Press
Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim and then acquired by the Penguin Group in 1975. History Guinzburg, a Harvard graduate and former employee of Simon and Schuster and Oppenheimer, a graduate of Williams College and Alfred A. Knopf, founded Viking in 1925 with the goal of publishing nonfiction and "distinguished fiction with some claim to permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest." B. W. Huebsch joined the firm shortly afterward. Harold Guinzburg's son Thomas became president in 1961. The firm's name and logo—a Viking ship drawn by Rockwell Kent—were meant to evoke the ideas of adventure, exploration, and enterprise implied by the word "Viking." In August 1961, they acquired H.B. Huesbsch, which maintained a list of backlist titles from authors such as James Joyce an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, (born 5 June 1939) is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer. Drabble's books include '' The Millstone'' (1965), which won the following year's John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and ''Jerusalem the Golden'', which won the 1967 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was honoured by the University of Cambridge in 2006, having earlier received awards from numerous redbrick (e.g. Sheffield, Hull, Manchester,) and plateglass universities (such as Bradford, Keele, University of East Anglia, East Anglia and University of York, York). She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award in 1973. Drabble also wrote biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson and edited two editions of ''The Oxford Companion to English Literature'' and a book on Thomas Hardy. Early life Drabble was born in Sheffield, the second daughter of the advocate and novelist John F. Drabble and the teacher Kathleen Marie (née Bloor) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bryan Sykes
Bryan Clifford Sykes (9 September 1947 – 10 December 2020) was a British geneticist and science writer who was a Fellow of Wolfson College and Emeritus Professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford.''Debrett's People of Today'' ''Debrett's People of Today''. Retrieved 2 February 2016. Sykes published the first report on retrieving DNA from ancient bone ('''', 1989). He was involved in a number of high-profile cases dealing with ancient DNA, including that of . He al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rebecca Swift
Rebecca Swift (10 January 1964 – 18 April 2017) was a British poet and essayist. She was co-founder in 1996 of The Literary Consultancy. Biography Rebecca Margaret Swift was born in Highbury, north London, the daughter of Clive Swift and Margaret Drabble. Her brothers are Adam Swift and Joe Swift. As a student, Swift attended the Camden School for Girls and New College, Oxford. From 1989 to 1995, she worked as a junior editor at Virago Press. She was fired after Virago was purchased by Little, Brown and Company. In 1992 and 1995, she published ''Letters from Margaret: The Fascinating Story of Two Babies Swapped at Birth'', and ''Imagining Characters'', respectively. She co-founded The Literary Consultancy, an editing company, in 1996 with Hannah Griffiths. The Literary Consultancy has helped many writers, including Prue Leith, Neamat Imam, and Jennifer Makumbi. In 2009, The Literary Consultancy became a founding member of the Free Word Centre. In 1999, Swift wrote "Are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matrilineality
Matrilineality is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which each person is identified with their matriline – their mother's lineage – and which can involve the inheritance of property and/or titles. A matriline is a line of descent from a female ancestor to a descendant (of either sex) in which the individuals in all intervening generations are mothersin other words, a "mother line". In a matrilineal descent system, an individual is considered to belong to the same descent group as their mother. This ancient matrilineal descent pattern is in contrast to the currently more popular pattern of patrilineal descent from which a family name is usually derived. The ''matriline'' of historical nobility was also called their enatic or uterine ancestry, corresponding to the patrilineal or "agnatic" ancestry. Early human kinship In the late 19th century, almost all prehistorians and anthropologists believed, followi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Radiant Way
''The Radiant Way'' is a 1987 novel by British novelist Margaret Drabble. The novel provides social commentary and critique of 1980s Britain, by exploring the lives of three Cambridge-educated women with careers as knowledge professionals. Plot summary The novel opens on New Year's Eve in 1979 as Liz Headland, a psychologist, prepares to host a party. She is married to a successful television executive and widower, Charles, and lives in a large house with her husband and nearly adult children. She has invited her two friends from her university days in Cambridge, whom she still regularly sees: Esther Breuer, a writer and lecturer on obscure historical artefacts, and Alix Bowen, who is teaching English literature to female prisoners. The novel follows these three women over the next seven years of their lives. Though relatively uneventful, during the party Liz realises that her husband, who is about to move to the USA for a new job, has been having an affair and plans on leaving ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Witch Of Exmoor
''The Witch of Exmoor'' is a 1996 novel by Margaret Drabble. The novel is a social novel, with a focus on exploring the state of post-Thatcher Britain through the Dickensian satire of the Palmer family. The title describes the satirical protagonist, Frieda Palmer, who provides the source of much of the social commentary. Reception The novel had mixed reviews. ''Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large na ...'' reviewer Frances Sellers suggested that the novel's criticism of "Britain's privileged middle classes" might have turned her critics, which would endear her to middle class reviewers. ''The New York Times'' reviewer James Wood did not like the novel, focusing on how the novel's characters were underdeveloped "caricatures" and poor comparisons to the liter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |